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STEWART
E. MILLER
1918-1990
BY C. CHAPIN CUTLER AND JOHN R. WHINNERY
STEWART EDWARD MILLER, a pioneer in microwave and optical
communications, cried February 27, 1990, in Midciletown, New
Jersey. Most of his career was with the Bell Laboratories, but
following his retirement from there in 1983 he was active as a
consultant to Bellcore until his cleath. His fifty-year career in
telecommunications established him as one of the most produc-
tive and influential leaders of this field.
Stewart (known to friends ant} colleagues as "Stew") was born
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September I, 1918. He attended
high school in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and three years at the
University of Wisconsin before transferring to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, receiving S.B. and S.M. degrees in
electrical engineering there in 1941. He joined the Bell Tele-
phone Laboratories (nowAT&T Bell Laboratories) thatyear and
began work on microwave racier and its components. He was a
technicalleaclerin design of X-band (3 cm) microwave plumbing
for the radar bombsight used on B-29 aircraft cluring World War
lI. Following the war, he became the key person on the L-3
coaxial cable carrier systems, but saw the potential for greater
information capacity through the use of higher carrier frequen-
cies and other wave-guicling systems. He transferred to the Radio
Research Department in Holmde} and macle vital contributions
to circular-electric modes for low-loss millimeter-wave guides,
201
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
microwave ferrite design, and many other millimeter-wave com-
ponents.
In the early 1960s, following the demonstration of the laser,
Stew was among the first to recognize the potential of optical
communications and from that point on concentrated on this
rapidly cleveloping technology. At that time there was no good
transmission medium for optics because fibers of that date were
impossibly lossy. As a result, Stew, who was then director of
Guicled Wave Research, initiated a program to investigate a
variety of periodic lens systems. With the availability of low-loss
fibers in the late 1960s, he proposed and participated in the
demonstration of single-material fibers that achieved single-
mode and multimocle guiding through transverse variation of
the dielectric material. He also proposed the combination of
several optical components on one semiconductor chip, and
proposed the name "integrated optics" as analogous to the
"integrated circuits" of moclern electronics. This proposal stim-
ulated a lively research endeavor, resulting in units that are now
being placed in systems.
Stew was made director of Lightwave Research at Bell Labora-
tories in 1980. Following his retirement from that position, his
work at BelIcore concentrated on analysis of semiconductor
lasers for improvements in noise and linewidth properties im-
portant to advanced fiber-optic communication systems, and he
also contributed to the new field of neural networks. lust a year
before his death he wrote a fundamental and incisive paper on
modal partition noise that was published in the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) journal of Quantum
Electronics (February 1990, p. 242~. He had more than forty
journal papers and eighty patents to his credit and was also
coeditor of two very comprehensive books, OpticalFiber Telecom-
munications (with Alan Chynoweth) and Optical Fiber Telecommu-
nications II (with Ivan Kaminow).
Stew was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in
1973. He was also a fellow of the Optical Society of America, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Life
Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the honor societies Sigmi
Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. He was instrumental in
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STEWART E. MILLER
203
establishing the annual Optical Fiber Conference, with the first
meeting in 1975, and was active in many other conference and
professional society committees. He received the Naval Ord-
nance DevelopmentAward in 1945, the IEEE Morris Liebmann
Award in 1972, the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award (with Tingye
Li and E.A.J. Marcatili) in 1975, the Stuart Ballantine Medal of
the Franklin Institute in 1977, and in 1989 the John Tyndal1
Award of the Laser and Electro-optics Society of IEEE for
distinguished contributions to fiber optics technology.
Stew was an active member of the Freehold, New Jersey,
Rotary, and was an enthusiastic and skillful renovator of Cor-
vairs. He is survived by his wife Helen and three sons, Chris
Richard of the U.S. Foreign Service; Stewart Ferguson, a pathol-
ogist in Tom's River; and Jonathan James, a software designer.
His family, friends, and colleagues are prouc! of the key role he
played in the development of lightwave communications—one
of the major technologies of this century.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
bell laboratories
