John Stone Stone

John Stone Stone (1869-1943) was an American electrical engineer and wireless pioneer, born in Dover, Virginia, who spent his first years in Egypt and the Mediterranean where his father served. He studied at the Columbia University School of Mines and Johns Hopkins University and began work in 1890 in the American Bell Telephone Company laboratory in Boston. There he invented the Stone common battery system for telephone exchanges and helped develop carrier-current transmission over wires and the loading of telephone cables with inductance. In 1902 he became director and chief engineer of the newly incorporated Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company, which made wireless telegraph apparatus, and he held a patent for loosely coupled tuned circuits whose priority over Marconi's system was later upheld by the United States Supreme Court. He helped found the Society of Wireless Telegraph Engineers, a forerunner of the Institute of Radio Engineers, served as IRE president in 1915, and from 1920 worked for AT&T for fifteen years.