Morris Tanenbaum (November 10, 1928 – February 26, 2023) was an American physical chemist and executive who worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Corporation.
He dealt with the separation of Bell Laboratories and AT&T, and became the first chief executive officer and chairman of the board at AT&T Corporation as of January 1, 1984.
Tanenbaum's parents were Jewish, and had emigrated from Russia and Poland, first to Buenos Aires, Argentina and then to the United States.
[5] Encouraged by professor Clark Bricker, who was himself moving, Tanenbaum went from Johns Hopkins to Princeton University for his doctoral work.
Tanenbaum received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1952 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Studies of the plastic flow and annealing behavior of zinc crystals.
Tanenbaum was closely involved in discussion of related senate legislation and helped to draft the proposed "Baxter I" amendment.
The first transistor had been created there in December 1947 by William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain.
Gordon Teal and technician Ernest Buehler did pioneering research on the growing and doping of semiconductor crystals between 1949 and 1952.
[15] Tanenbaum built on Pearson's research, and worked with technical assistant Ernest Buehler,[16] whom he described as "a master craftsman in building apparatus and growing semiconductor crystals.
He announced the results and displayed the TI transistors on May 10, 1954, at the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio.
The news convinced executive Jack Andrew Morton to return early from a trip to Europe and adopt silicon as the material for the company's future transistor and diode development.
[12] The initial goal at Shockley Semiconductor was to fabricate prototype n-p-n silicon transistors, based on the “mesa” structure pioneered by Tanenbaum and his co-workers at Bell Labs.
[4] After becoming Assistant Director of the Metallurgical Department at Bell Labs in 1962, Tanenbaum led a group doing basic research into applied metallurgy.
John Eugene Kunzler was interested in the electrical properties of commercially important metals at low temperatures.
Kunzler tried developing superconducting coils to meet Kompfner's needs, using lead-bismuth alloys, drawn into wire and insulated with copper.
[25][26] Berndt Matthias had discovered that a brittle ceramic-like material, Nb3Sn, compounded of niobium and tin, could achieve high temperatures.
They sought to avoid Nb3Sn's fragility issues by delaying the point at which the material was formed: 1) combining a mixture of ductile, pure niobium metal and tin metal powders in the proper ratio, 2) using it to fill a tube formed from a non-superconducting metal such as copper, silver or stainless steel, 3) drawing the composite tube into a fine wire which could then be coiled and 4) finally heating the already-coiled tube to a temperature at which the niobium and tin powders would react chemically to form Nb3Sn.
[2] Tanenbaum eventually moved from research into management, a change in focus that some speculate may have cost him a Nobel Prize.