John R. Pierce

John Robinson Pierce (1910–2002) was an American electrical engineer, scientist, and science fiction author renowned as the father of communications satellites, having pioneered the Echo and Telstar satellites. He earned his PhD from Caltech, worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1936 to 1971, and also contributed to pulse-code modulation, psychoacoustics, and the Bohlen-Pierce musical scale while writing science fiction under pseudonyms like John Pierce and J.J. Coupling.