Former Bell Labs president William O Baker, who advised United States presidents on intelligence gathering and oversaw researchers who won back-to-back Nobel Prizes, including for work underpinning the Big Bang theory on origin of the universe, has died at age 90.
Baker died on Monday of respiratory failure at a nursing home in northern New Jersey where he lived, telecommunications gear maker Lucent Technologies of Murray Hill said on Tuesday. Bell Labs is Lucent’s research arm. Its scientists have won six Nobels and other prestigious prizes.
Baker headed Bell Labs from 1973 to 1979, when its scientists won two Nobel Prizes in physics. In 1977, the lab’s Phillip W Anderson was a co-winner with two other scientists for theoretical research involving the electronic structure of magnetic systems, work that underlies many later technical developments in electronics.
The following year, two Bell Lab scientists — Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson — shared the Nobel in physics for discovering faint background radiation in space believed to be left over from the Big Bang, a massive explosion of a superdense atom billions of years ago that most astronomers believe created the universe.
Earlier in his career, Baker served as an adviser on science and foreign intelligence to presidents from Harry Truman to Gerald Ford, primarily on use of computers, satellite reconnaissance and other technology for intelligence gathering. At president Dwight Eisenhower’s request, Baker in 1959 created a plan to set up the Defence Communications Agency — implemented under president John F Kennedy in 1961.
Baker also was a member of the president’s science advisory committee and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for decades.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Baker earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from Princeton University and in 1938 joined the Bell Labs technical staff. Over the next decades, he headed up polymer research and was assistant director of chemical and metallurgical research, becoming vice-president of research in 1955.
Baker retired in 1980 but continued serving as an adviser to foundations, the government and academic institutions, according to Lucent.
He is survived by a son, Joseph. Baker’s wife of nearly 60 years, Frances, died in 1999. A private memorial service was being planned. — Sapa-AP