John Hilliard

Biography

John K. Hilliard (IRE Associate, 1925; Member, 1929; Senior Member, 1943; and Fellow, 1952) was born in Wyndmere, North Dakota, on 22 October 1901. He received the B.S. degree in physics from Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1925, and did graduate work in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. He received the D.Sc. degree in engineering from Hollywood University, in California, in 1951.

Hilliard worked at the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Culver City, California, for fourteen years, where he was engaged in the development of recording and reproducing film and tape equipment, as well as designing microphones and loudspeakers for theaters. Then he was employed at the Radiation Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, as Project Engineer. In the mid-1940s, he took a job with the Altec Lansing Corporation, Anaheim, California, where he was concerned with transducers and communication equipment. In 1962, he was the Vice President and Director of the Ling-Altec Research Division.

Hilliard was a Fellow of IRE, the Acoustical Society of America, the Audio Society, and SMPTE, and a member of AIEE, Eta Kappa Nu, the Institute of Environmental Engineers, and the Armed Forces Committee on Hearing Bioacoustics. In 1962, he also was an Acoustic Consultant to the Brain Institute, UCLA, Medical School.