History - About My Grandfather
Go to Top
About
Board Services
Imagine Network®
Imagine Wireless™
Home
Advisory Services
Technical Services
Quotes
History
Contact
Philander Norton was my grandfather. As the New York Times obituary noted in 1935, he was the Technical Assistant to the President of Bell Telephone Laboratories, today he would be called a Chief Technology Officer. He also became the Editor of the Bell System Technical Journal, the technical bible about the work coming from Bell Labs during that time. Before the formation of Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925, he worked in the Laboratories of Western Electric. During World War I, he worked on Department of Defense engineering applications, specifically enemy submarine detection off of the Eastern Seaboard, which I suspect was an earlier version of what we would today call Sonar. AT&T was instrumental in providing communications and development for the Department of Defense during World War I and World War II. In this way, he helped defend the country’s coastline at a time when German Submarines were near our coastlines trying to sink supply ships bound for the war in Europe. He was an undergraduate of Princeton and received a Master of Arts and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Princeton’s Graduate Programs.
He died at 53 from pneumonia, when my mother was very young, leaving his wife a widow and a single mother with two sons and a daughter. When I was growing up, I would hear stories about my Grandfather and his work at Bell Telephone Laboratories from time to time. My mother wasn’t technical (although she majored in Mathematics at Vassar College), but she understood that he had accomplished quite a bit during his career and was highly respected at both BTL and at AT&T Corporate (where he also had an office in AT&T Headquarters in NYC on lower Broadway). Bell Telephone Laboratories honored their commitment to his memory and the widow and her young family by awarding them his pension, so she and my mother could continue to live in their house in Port Washington and pay the family expenses during what remained of the Great Depression, on through World War II, and until she died. The two boys were already in college at that time. I had to discover most of what I know about him later in life. BTL at that time was based in New York City on West Street (Wiki) and in 1927 set up a field laboratory in Holmdel, NJ. Bell Telephone Laboratories would later move from West Street to Murray Hill, NJ. where many discoveries were made and the Transistor was invented.
Bell Telephone Laboratories was formed in 1925 by merging various laboratories at Western Electric and AT&T. My Grandfather was among those that moved over to the new, at that time, cutting edge laboratories. Back then, BTL was an amazing place. Many of the technologies we take for granted today were developed there.
I honor his memory, the memory of my Grandmother and Mother with ImagineLaboratories.com.
ImagineLaboratory.com™
Imagination
Arts Lab®
Copyright © 2023 Imagine Labs LLC
All rights reserved.
ImagineLaboratories.com™, ImagineLaboratory.com™,
ImagineLabs.net™, Imagine Wireless™ and Imagine Labs™ are
trademarks of Imagine Labs LLC
Imagination Arts Lab® is a Registered
Imagine Network® is a Registered trademark
and Imagine Wireless™ and Imagine Satellite ™ are
trademarks of Imagine.com Telecommunications, Inc.
