Donald Quarles

Donald A. Quarles was an American electrical engineer and telephone research executive who later held senior defense posts. Born in Van Buren, Arkansas, in 1894, he graduated from Yale in 1916, served as a field artillery captain in the First World War and worked as an engineer for Western Electric. He joined its inspection engineering department in 1924, which became Bell Telephone Laboratories the next year, and rose to direct its transmission development work, which concentrated on military electronic systems such as radar during the Second World War. He became a vice president of Bell Laboratories in 1948 and in 1952 president of Sandia Corporation. He served as president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1952 to 1953, then as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development from 1953 and as Secretary of the Air Force from 1955.