Historical note: Warren P. Mason (1900-1986) physicist, engineer, inventor, author, teacher

This paper is based on an invited talk in the Warren P. Mason Memorial Session at the 117th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Syracuse, NY, May 22-26, 1989. Warren Perry Mason, a Charter Member, Fellow, President, and Gold Medalist of the Acoustical Society of America, consistently applied his understanding of fundamentals to explain physical processes and create practical devices. As a physicist, he led us to a better understanding of fundamental effects in liquids and solids. He made the first measurement of shear elasticity in liquids and helped establish the type of motion that polymer chains can make. In solids, he contributed to quantitative understandings of phonon drag on charge carriers in semiconductors, fatigue of metals, and damping of acoustic waves in metals, insulators, semiconductors, alloys, and rocks. As an engineer and inventor, he led advances in mufflers and noise control, electromechanical filters for carrier frequency telephony, piezoelectric crystals and ceramics for electromechanical transducers, and semiconductor strain gauges. With about 200 patents, he is the most prolific inventor in the history of Bell Labs. As an author and teacher, he wrote more than 200 papers and four reference books that teach fundamental concepts, give complete tensorial descriptions of numerous physical interactions in crystals, describe research results, and guide the reader to the related literature. In this paper, we show some early pictures of Mason and his family, transmit some stories, and give an example of a communication device in which Mason would surely have been interested, namely an acoustically tuned optical filter.<
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