Amos E. Joel

An electrical engineer, Joel had a fascination with telephones -- and patents -- all his life, and made his career at the venerable telephone R&D company, Bell Labs. It was Joel who figured out how to automate the billing of long distance calls; it took more than 500 pages to describe for the resulting patent, one of more than 70 awarded to him. But he's best known for an invention patented in 1972: the system that allows a wireless phone call to be handed from one tower to the next without disrupting the call -- which was needed to make cell phones workable. "Without his invention, there wouldn't be all these people walking around with cellphones," said Frank Vigilante, one of Joel's supervisors at Bell Labs. "He really allowed that business to form and to be a business." Joel retired in 1983, and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007. He died October 25, at 90. From This is True for 26 October 2008 Suggestions for further reading: Dark End of the Spectrum by Anthony S. Policastro Amazon Price: Customer Review: I was surprised to read that this author touts himself as a technology expert and as a writer. This is one of the worst books I have ever written. The technology is all over the place, and most of it is nonsense. Worse than the poorly understood te...   The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SD... by Erica Sadun Amazon Price: $31.49 Customer Review: Erica Sadun's book and code are excellence itself. I started out with Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours, which is a fine book. However, as someone with several years' coding experience (and none on Apple platforms), I cou...   Beginning iPhone Games Development by PJ Cabrera, Peter Bakhirev, Ian Marsh, Ben Smith, Eric Wing, Scott Penberthy Amazon Price: $26.39 Customer Review: I poured over all the iPhone "game" programming books before finally finding this nugget. Let's face it, so many books that claim to teach gaming fall shy of anything practical you end up finishing most books with very little commercial knowledge. Th...   Head First iPhone Development: A Learner's Guide to Creating Objective-C Appl... by Dan Pilone, Tracey Pilone Amazon Price: $29.69 Customer Review: I respect their attempts to create an engaging book, however the content is probably not going to appeal to you unless you are younger or have serious ADD (Not saying with any insulting tone). I personally haven't finished it because it ...   Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl Amazon Price: $10.04 Customer Review: In one of Edward Hopper's most famous paintings (Automat, 1927), a woman sits alone, a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. She is alone, as most of the people in Hopper paintings are, even when others share the landscape with them. (See Night...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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