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Signals: The Science of Telecommunications
Signals The Science of Telecommunications Author:John Robinson Pierce, A. Michael Noll When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in the 1870's, he predicted that soon people around the world would be speaking to each other over connecting wires. Bell's creation and forecast sparked a revolution in telecommunications - a revolution that has spanned more than a century and transformed the world we live in. — &nb... more »sp; From Bell's early attempts at sending sound waves of speech via an electric current to NASA's beaming of signals to Voyager and from James Clerk Maxwell's deciphering of the laws of electromagnetism to our latest use of lasers, 'Signals: The Science of Telecommunications' shows how ingenious researchers and inventors have transformed the laws of physics into the technology of telecommunications. Authors John R. Pierce and A. Michael Noll first trace the history of the field, profiling the pioneers of the science and their visions for the future. They survey the surprising number of discoveries, theories, and fields of research that have contributed to modern technology, including Fourier and signal spectra, Shannon's information theory, studies of human speech, and solid-state quantum physics. They then chronicle the technological progress that saw telephony grow from signals transmitted one at a time on single wires to tens of thousands of conversations traveling simultaneously over optical fibers.
Pierce and Noll were on the scene at the time of such great creations as the transistor - so named by Pierce himself - and they bring to Signals a first-hand appreciation of the people behind the discoveries. Moreover, as they review advances such as the cellular phone, electronic mail, and the two-way picturephone, they give us a glimpse of the future of human communication.« less