Warren P. Mason
Warren Perry Mason (September 28, 1900 – August 23, 1986) was an American electrical engineer and physicist at Bell Labs.
A graduate of Columbia University, he had a prolific output, publishing four books and nearly a hundred papers.
His work included acoustics, filters, crystals and ceramics, materials science, polymer chemistry, ultrasonics, bonding to semiconductors, internal friction, and viscoelasticity.
He found experimental evidence of electron-phonon coupling in solids and made measurements that aided the theories of phonon drag and superconductivity.
[8] He was amongst the first three fellows elected to the Society of Engineering Science in 1975 together with Ahmed Cemal Eringen and Harold Liebowitz.
[11] Mason worked on mechanical filters, a key component of frequency-division multiplexing in telephone carrier systems.
[18] During World War II, Mason was tasked with finding a stronger material than neoprene to make sonar domes.
The requirement was for a material that retained neoprene's good match to the sonic transmission properties of sea water but had an elastic modulus thousands of times greater.
Mason tried mixtures based on cellulose esters whose smell was so bad he was driven out of the lab to a nearby lake to do the testing.
Together with Ronald Wick, Mason invented the Mason-Wick horn, a mechanical impedance transformer.
This consisted of a solid, exponentially tapered barium titanate rod and was used in experiments to amplify mechanical vibrations.
[21] In ultrasonics, Mason provided the first demonstration of single-chain viscoelasticity in which the elasticity is due to the individual molecular chains themselves rather than their entanglement.
[22] In 1956 Mason and H. E. Bömmel found experimental evidence for electron-phonon coupling in pure samples of lead and tin.
Mason used ultrasonics to develop his theory that internal friction in metal alloys and rocks was due to dislocations.
Like the fictional lawyer, Mason was said to be able to extract information from sparse data that others would find insufficient to draw conclusions.
Mason was known for his peculiar habit of pacing in place while thinking, which he apparently did to avoid missing experimental results as they happened.
