This Professional Development Fellowship combines the talents of a professional historian and a professional engineer to investigate topics in the history of communications technology. Host historian Bruce Hunt will work closely with electrical engineering professor Karl Stephan to train him in the historian's techniques of archival research, analysis and argument. Included in the training component will be reading and discussion, seminar participation, and other instructional opportunities. Stephan will use these abilities to investigate technical aspects of progress in the U.S. telegraph industry after 1900, the influences which the technical advances in frequency control had on radio broadcasting in the 1920s, and the significance of high-frequency measurements in the development of communications technology since 1945. The research will culminate in an article suitable for a scholarly journal such as Technology and Culture.
