Louis Alan Hazeltine

Louis Alan Hazeltine (1886 to 1964) was an engineer and physicist, the inventor of the Neutrodyne circuit and the Hazeltine-Fremodyne superregenerative circuit, and the founder of the Hazeltine Corporation. He was born in Morristown, New Jersey, attended the Stevens Institute of Technology, majoring in electrical engineering, and graduated in 1906, then took a job with General Electric. He returned to Stevens to teach and became chair of its electrical engineering department in 1917. The next year he became a consultant to the United States Navy, later advised the government on radio broadcasting regulation, and served on the National Defense Research Committee during the Second World War. He is best known for the Neutrodyne radio receiver circuit of 1922, which neutralized interelectrode capacitance in triode amplifiers to prevent unwanted feedback and allowed stable multi-stage radio-frequency amplification; it was widely licensed to radio manufacturers in the early 1920s. He was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1936.