[1] A mechanical aptitude began to emerge at an early age: at fifteen, Bill learned how to fix a motor vehicle engine, how to wire a shed for electrical lighting, build radios, and create a crude form of cinematography.

[5][6] When Java, too, was overrun Phillips was captured by the Japanese, and spent three and a half years interned in a prisoner of war camp in the then Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

[7] Laurens van der Post, who was in captivity with Phillips, described him as "one of the most singularly contained people I knew, quiet, true and without any trace of exhibitionism".

[3] In 1946, he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his war service, in particular for his development of a system that allowed Brewster Buffalo fighter planes to fire through the propeller.

This sort of pattern had been noticed earlier by Irving Fisher, but, based on Phillip's intuition that “[w]hen the demand for labour is high and there are very few unemployed we should expect employers to bid wages rates up quite rapidly” [9] and that firms would put up prices as a result,[10] he published his own paper in 1958 on the relationship between inflation and unemployment,[9] a relationship which became known as the Phillips curve.

Soon after the publication of Phillips' paper, the idea that there was a trade-off between a strong economy and low inflation caught the imagination of academic economists and policy-makers alike.

Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow wrote an influential article describing the possibilities suggested by the Phillips curve in the context of the United States.