Edward L. Norton
Created and Claimed by yyang414 (Yuchen Kenneth Yang). PHYS 2212.
Early Years and Career
Edward Lawry Norton was born in Rockland, Maine on July 28th, 1898. He was known as an American electrical engineer whom the Norton equivalent circuit is named. In his early career, Norton served as a radio operator in the United States Navy between the years of 1917 to 1919. He attended the University of Maine for one year before and for one year after his wartime service, then transferred to MIT in 1920 to obtain his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1922. Afterwards, he began to work at the Western Electric Corporation in New York City, which eventually became Bell Laboratories in 1925. While working for Western Electric, he earned an MA degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1925.
Publications
Among Norton's publications include a consistent subject of resistance networks with applications to filter groups—including the Bell System Technical Journal, magnetic fluxmeter in the Bell Laboratories Record and dynamic measurements on electromagnetic devices in the Transactions of the AIEE. Throughout his career, Norton had written ninety-two technical memoranda—however, because of his lack of publications most of the work that Norton preferred were behind the scene. As described in his history in Bell Labs, Norton's reserved nature contradicted his capabilities.
Telegraph
Norton was something of a legendary figure in network theory work who turned out a prodigious number of designs armed only with a slide rule and his intuition. Many anecdotes survive. On one occasion T.C. Fry called in his network theory group, which included at that time Bode, Darlington and R.L. Dietzold among others, and told them: "You fellows had better not sign up for any graduate courses or other outside work this coming year because you are going to take over the network design that Ed Norton has been doing single-handed." [A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925-1975), p. 210]
Norton's Theorem
This paragraph clearly defines what is now known as the Norton equivalent circuit in the United States. Norton never published this result or mentioned it in any of his 18 patents and 3 publications. In Europe, it is known as the Mayer-Norton equivalent. The German telecommunications engineer Hans Ferdinand Mayer published the same result in the same month as Norton's technical memorandum. Norton retired in 1961 and died on January 28, 1983 at the King James Nursing Home in Chatham, New Jersey.
Further sources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWikHrjw5GI
Norton's Theorem
References
http://www.ece.rice.edu/~dhj/norton/
http://eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/about/history/famous-scientists/