John Stone Stone was an American mathematician, physicist and inventor. He was one of the few theoreticians among early radio engineers.
Background
John was born on September 24, 1869 at Dover, Virginia, United States, one of at least three children and the only son of General Charles Pomeroy Stone and his second wife, Annie Jeannie (Stone) Stone, from whom the son derived his double name.
General Stone, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of West Point, had served as a Union officer in the Civil War, during which he met and married a Louisiana girl descended from a Maryland family of the same surname. His career was blighted, however, by charges of incompetence after the defeat at Ball's Bluff. Leaving the army, he became superintendent of a mining company in Virginia, but in 1870 accepted an appointment as chief of staff of the Egyptian army. From 1870 until 1883, General Stone held the post of Chief of Staff to the khedive of Egypt, and, while growing up in Cairo, John Stone Stone became fluent in Arabic, French, German and Spanish in addition to English.
Education
John Stone was educated by private tutors and, upon the family's return to the United States in 1883, at the Columbia Grammar School in New York City.
He began his college training at Columbia University's School of Mines (1886 - 88), where he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and electricity, and completed it at Johns Hopkins University (1888 - 90), where he worked with the great physicist Henry A. Rowland but did not take a degree.
Career
In 1890 Stone entered the research laboratory of the American Bell Telephone Company in Boston. There he experimented with radiotelephony and proposed carrier telephony over wire circuits, though both ideas were in advance of the times.
In 1892 he received the first two patents (relating to the development and distribution of electric current in a telephone cable) of the more than 120 he received during his lifetime. Stone left the telephone company in 1899 to become a consulting engineer, with his own office in Boston.
Continuing his work on radio, or "wireless telegraphy, " he was among the first to see the need for sharper tuning and greater frequency selectivity in both the transmitter and the receiver. To meet this need he developed and patented (1902) a system comprising a pair of loosely coupled resonant circuits to be used in each; his invention anticipated by several months a similar one of Marconi, who obtained his famed "four-tuned-circuits" patent in 1903. (A few weeks after Stone's death, his priority was established by a ruling of the United States Supreme Court. )
In 1902 Stone incorporated the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company to manufacture and market his inventions, which were widely adopted in early radio apparatus. The company made contributions to the development of carefully calibrated meters, early antenna measurements, and marine direction finding, but it did not achieve commercial success and failed in 1910. In the following year Stone moved to New York City, where he resumed consulting work and established himself as an expert witness in patent litigations.
In 1919 he moved to the milder climate of San Diego, California. There he continued his scientific investigations as associate engineer at large for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, a position he held from 1920 until his retirement in 1934.
His later work centered on short-wave and ultra-short-wave radio, including an antenna design which foreshadowed later high-frequency long-distance beam transmission. Of most lasting significance among Stone's publications is the paper "The Practical Aspects of the Propagation of High-Frequency Electric Waves along Wires", for which he received the Franklin Institute's Longstreth Medal in 1913.
After retirement he lived very quietly. He died at his home in San Diego at the age of seventy-three, of heart disease due to arteriosclerosis.
Achievements
Religion
Stone was a member of the Episcopal Church.
Membership
He was a member of the American Defense Society's Board of Trustees. He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; member of the American Electrochemical Society; Associate of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; member of the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; member of the Mathematical and Physical Club. He was also a member of the St. Botolph, Technology and Papyrus clubs of Boston, the National Arts Club of New York, the Army and Navy Club, and Cosmos Club of Washington.
Personality
Stone's health was never robust.
Quotes from others about the person
Frederick A. Kolster tols about Stone: "No man has contributed more to the advancement of the Radio Science than has John Stone Stone, and no man is more thoroughly entitled to the full and grateful appreciation of the entire Radio World. "
Interests
He was devoted to the arts, particularly painting and music.
Connections
On November 28, 1918, Stone married Sibyl Wilbur of Elmira, New York, a journalist. They had no children, and the marriage ended in divorce.