Louis Winslow Austin

Louis Winslow Austin (1867 to 1932) was an American radio researcher who spent most of his working life on the way radio waves travel over long distances. Born in Orwell, Vermont, he graduated from Middlebury College in 1889, took a doctorate at Strasbourg in 1893, taught physics at the University of Wisconsin and then worked in a Berlin laboratory on gases at high temperatures. In 1904 he joined the Bureau of Standards in Washington, where he led the Navy radio laboratory from 1908 to 1923. With Louis Cohen he developed the Austin-Cohen formula for predicting radio signal strength, drawing on measurements made on Navy ships crossing the Atlantic in 1910. He was the third president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1914 and received its Medal of Honor in 1927.