Warren P. Mason

Both his mother and father graduated from the University of Michigan around 1890.

His father died when he was fifteen.

His elder brother, Edward Sagendorph Mason, became a notable economist.

Mason obtained a B.Sc.

Warren Perry Mason (September 28, 1900 – August 23, 1986) was an American electrical engineer and physicist at Bell Labs.

A graduate of Columbia University, he had a prolific output, publishing four books and nearly a hundred papers.

He was issued over two hundred patents, more than anyone else at Bell Labs.

His work included acoustics, filters, crystals and ceramics, materials science, polymer chemistry, ultrasonics, bonding to semiconductors, internal Friction, and viscoelasticity.

Mason founded the field of distributed-element circuits.

He was the first to experimentally show viscoelasticity in individual molecules.

He found experimental evidence of electron-phonon coupling in solids and made measurements that aided the theories of phonon drag and superconductivity.

Many of Mason's inventions in electronics are still widely used by modern circuit designers.

Mason was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 28, 1900, to Kate Sagendorph Mason and Edward Luther Mason, a school principal and insurance salesman.

in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1921.

Mason joined the Western Electric Company in 1921.

He continued his education part-time after this at Columbia University, obtaining an M.A. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1928, both in physics.

In 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) was split off from Western Electric as a separate company.

Mason went with Bell Labs and remained there for his entire career.

with other renowned acousticians, at the Bell headquarters in New York City, on December 27, 1928.

Mason married Evelyn Stuart McNally in 1929.

Evelyn was a graduate of Rutgers University and worked as a child psychologist in schools.

They had a daughter, Penelope E. Mason.

Evelyn died in 1953.

Mason married his second wife, Edith Ewing Aylsworth, a teacher, in 1956.

Mason was president of the Acoustical Society of America in 1956.

Mason and Edith were passengers in the 1965 Carmel mid-air collision.

Their plane crash-landed near Danbury, Connecticut, where several people died, including the pilot, who re-entered the burning plane in an attempt to rescue a passenger.

He retired from Bell Labs in 1965 but remained a consultant there for a further two years.

After retirement, he held a visiting professor post at Columbia University and was a research associate at Columbia's Henry Krumb School of Mines.

He was amongst the first three fellows elected to the Society of Engineering Science in 1975 together with Ahmed Cemal Eringen and Harold Liebowitz.

Mason retired from Columbia in 1977.

Warren Perry Mason is one of the founders of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA).

Edith died in 1985.

Mason died 23 August 23, 1986, in Gainesville, Florida.

Mason's work covered a wide range of fields.

A large part of his work concerned filtering, not only in the electrical domain, but also in the mechanical and acoustic domains.

Other fields of study included piezoelectric crystals and ceramics, ferroelectric crystals, underwater sound transducers, bonding of metals to metals and semiconductors, physics of wear, semiconductor strain gauges, metal fatigue, and internal Friction of solids and liquids.

Mason worked on mechanical filters, a key component of frequency-division multiplexing in telephone carrier systems.

They can be made with much sharper transition bands than can be achieved with conventional LC filters.

Mason invented a new type of mechanical filter, the quartz crystal filter consisting of lattices of crystals, which became the standard form of filtering on these systems.