2005 Lifetime Achievement Award Presented to Gordon E. Moore

Gordon E. Moore, the chemical engineer who in 1968 co-founded Intel, spearheading decades of technological research and developments that made the company a leader in semiconductor manufacturing and technology, has been named the Marconi Society's 2005 Lifetime Achievement recipient.

Moore is widely known for his 1965 prediction which stated that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on an integrated circuit would double every year. In 1975, the timeline was updated to once every couple of years. While originally published in Electronics magazine as a rule of thumb, Moore's Law paved the way for semiconductor engineers to efficiently and inexpensively squeeze more transistors onto an integrated circuit to increase computing performance, creating a worldwide industry standard that has extended computing from the domain of the highly technical to the realm of the eminently practical.

Gordon Moore is the third person to receive the Marconi Society's Lifetime Achievement Award during the organization's 31-year history. In 2000, the award was presented to mathematician Claude E. Shannon, the founder of modern information theory who invented the concept of the bit, and in 2003, to William O. Baker, who, as director of research and later president of Bell Laboratories, oversaw the development of a wide array of technologies that earned its researchers eleven Nobel Prizes during his tenure at the helm.

A director of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, Moore also serves on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology. He received the National Medal of Technology from President George Bush in 1990. In 2000, Moore and his wife established the Gordon E. and Betty Moore Foundation, which promotes environmental conservation, science, higher education, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

2003 Lifetime Achievement Award Presented to Dr. William O. Baker

William O. Baker, retired Chairman and President of Bell Labs and a widely recognized champion of communications research and development, today was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation at Columbia University. Bell Labs is the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies.

This is only the second time the 29-year-old Marconi Foundation has bestowed this honor. Bell Labs' Claude Shannon, the founder of modern information theory, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award three years ago.

Dr. Baker, who throughout his illustrious career preferred to shun personal celebrity, accepted the honor in typical fashion at a small gathering of associates and friends, which included Martin Meyerson, honorary chairman of the Marconi Foundation, and John J. Iselin, its president. Current Bell Labs President Bill O'Shea and former Bell Labs President John Mayo (1991-1995) were also on hand to honor Dr. Baker.

"Bill Baker towers above any other individual as the champion of industrial research in service to society," said Dr. Meyerson, president emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania. "He has devoted more than six decades to being a diplomat of science in advocating and championing basic research for improving life in America."

In his brief acceptance remarks, Dr. Baker noted, "as the Marconi Foundation well knows and promotes in its activities and actions, science and technology ultimately serve humankind by enriching and bettering our lives and spirits." Crediting Shannon, Marconi and other leading innovators with unleashing technologies that yielded advances like optical fiber, electronic switching, digital media, cellular radio, and broadcast radio and television, he added: "Words are not adequate to express our sincere appreciation of what our colleagues have achieved over these many years. Bell Labs was, and continues to be, at the forefront of so many of these advances."

Dr. Baker, 88, who retired from Bell Labs in 1980, is the only individual granted the honorary title of Chairman. He began his career at Bell Labs 41 years earlier as a member of technical staff, working in a converted garage in Summit, New Jersey. His field was polymer chemistry and he was granted eleven patents for this work. In the ensuing four decades, his responsibilities grew steadily, until his appointment as President of Bell Labs in 1973. During Dr. Baker's leadership, Bell Labs forged the model for modern industrial research laboratories.

Often called upon to advise U.S. presidents on science and technology issues, Dr. Baker's leadership in applying science and technology to the areas of national security and intelligence gathering was critical during the Cold War period. Even in retirement, he has continued to advise various foundations, academic institutions, and government agencies.

In addition to his numerous professional awards and more than 25 honorary doctorates, in 1982 he was presented the Presidential National Security Award, and in 1988, the U.S. National Medal of Science.

Lifetime Achivement Award 2003: William O. Baker Acceptance Speech

August 7, 2003

Chairman Meyerson, President Iselin, and distinguished guests:

I am grateful to join with you this afternoon to celebrate the legacy of Guglielmo Marconi and his daughter, Gioia Marconi Braga, who founded your eminent institution, currently under the admirable leadership of Francesco Paresce, grandson of Marconi. And I feel a special privilege of association today with my esteemed associates from Bell Labs, Bill O'Shea and John Mayo, who were able to join us.

I thank you all, and in particular, the Marconi Board for their insightful recognition of our combined contributions. It has been a great joy to be with you all today and to share our feelings.

In concert with the traditions of Bell Labs and its affiliates, we should report of innovations. One particular has to do with the application of signals and symbols, with words and meanings. This assembly this afternoon is unsurpassed in its implication for words and language. But innovation has transcended that in the finding that it is signals and symbols and systems inscribed in the heart, beyond even language or technology, which you all here have made such heroic participation.

So I thank you again in submitting the finding that the Marconi Board's insightful recognition involves a new mode of signaling and expression of the digital era and their associates of the operation we recognize, which is that things and experiences and aspirations of our community are indeed of the heart. And we say again how deeply this is valued and appreciated, felt, and so much treasured by us all. So we thank you, indeed, and it has been a great joy to be with you all today.

2000 Lifetime Achievement Award Presented to Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon

Claude Shannon, Father of Information Theory, Dies at 84

1916-2001 Obituary

The Foundation in the fall of 2000 honored Dr. Claude Shannon for his lifetime achievement in information theory. Much of his general theory was conceived by Shannon a few years after the death in the late 'thirties of Guglielmo Marconi. Shannon's discoveries, like Marconi's, are among the significant intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century.

As a young graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Claude Shannon was stimulated by his then professor, Vannevar Bush, to develop the Differential Analyzer, which he did in part by turning to electrical circuits instead of mechanical parts. Early on, he measured information by binary digits, with their yes/no concepts, and conceived the term "bit". By the time he was 21, in 1937, he was imaginatively using Boolean algebraic principles for his scientific and technical propositions. Soon, some of his discoveries were utilized for telephone systems. His master's thesis was "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits". His brilliant research career at Bell Labs started in 1941.

Shannon's concepts underlie the information society in which we live. His book, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, has been proclaimed the Magna Carta of the information age, and was and still is instrumental in fields as varied as computer science, genetics, linguistics and neuroanatomy.

An engineer with a philosophical bent, his analysis of information (and his sense of the distinction between information and meaning) range across communications media, including radio, television, telephone, computers, cryptography and servomechanisms. His findings provide a key knowledge base for the discipline of communication engineering, and his insights into coding and error-correction shaped the work of a generation of scientists, engineers and designers of information systems. His 1949 essay, "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" helped transform cryptography into a science.

On the M.I.T. faculty, Shannon became the distinguished Donner Professor of Science, and given his breadth, he steadily outlined experimental horizons for future analysis. He divided his career years between M.I.T. and Bell Labs (itself a unique research center), where his brilliance and insights set standards for his colleagues, and standards which persist. His numerous awards include the National Medal of Science and the Kyoto Prize in Basic Science. Claude Shannon is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineering-and in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society. In recent days, a statue of Shannon was erected in his home state of Michigan, where his first degrees came from the University of Michigan. A casting of that statue has also been placed at Bell Labs.

In May 1998, Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories marked the importance of Shannon's work and the 50th anniversary of Information Theory with a special symposium. About half of the participants who spoke there were recipients over the years of the Marconi Foundation's research Fellowships.

This Foundation, recognizing that very many of its Fellows and others associated with it were mentored by him, and convinced that Shannon's information theories provided bases for communications in many areas of activity, bestowed upon him the distinction of the Lifetime Achievement Award. This was the first award of this kind ever conferred by the Marconi Foundation.