Frederick B. Llewellyn

Dr. Frederick Britton Llewellyn (September 16, 1897 - December 10, 1971) was a noted American electrical engineer.

Llewellyn was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He took a course at the Marconi School for Wireless Operators in 1915, spent some three years in the merchant marine, and almost a year in the Navy in 1917-1918. He then studied under Professor Alan Hazeltine at Stevens Institute of Technology, receiving his M.E. degree in 1922.

After a year as laboratory assistant to Dr. F. K. Vreeland, he joined Western Electric in 1923, transferring in 1925 to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on the long-wave transatlantic telephone based in Rocky Point, Long Island. From 1924-1928 he studied at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1928.

Llewellyn helped develop the first public ship-to-shore telephone service, inaugurated in 1929 on the SS Leviathan. In the 1930s he studied noise in vacuum tubes and constant-frequency oscillators, and researched the behavior of vacuum tubes at very high frequencies. During World War II, he served as a consultant to the Office of Secretary of War. He and Edwin H. Armstrong designed a sensitive receiver used to detect a radar signal reflected from the moon (Project Diana). After the war, he served as a consulting engineer, primarily on military electronics systems, assistant to the President of Bell Telephone Laboratories 1956-1961, affiliate of the Institute of Science and Technology at the University of Michigan 1961-1965, and research director of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1965 until retirement in 1967.

Llewellyn was a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers, and awarded the 1936 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award for his results on high-frequency electronics and constant-frequency oscillators.

Selected works

;Books
* "Electron-Inertia Effects", Cambridge University Press, 1941.;Patents
* : "High frequency tank circuit" (Bell Telephone Laboratories)
* : "Guided wave transmission" (Bell Telephone Laboratories)

References

* [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10933/35703/01694893.pdf Proceedings of the IRE]
* [http://www.ieeecincinnati.org/2005/05/04/frederick-b-llewellyn/ Biography by James E. Brittain]
* [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10933/35003/01670486.pdf Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Volume 18, Number 1, January, 1930]
* [http://www.infoage.org/diamof.html Radar Echoes from the Moon, January 1946]
* "Frederick Llewellyn, Top Engineer, Dies", Washington Post, December 11, 1971.