Edmond Bruce was an American radio pioneer best known for creating the rhombic antenna

Rhombic antenna

A rhombic antenna is a broadband directional antenna co-invented by Edmond Bruce and Harald Friis, mostly commonly used in HF ranges.- Technical Detail :...

 and Bruce array.

Bruce was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, and Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 In 1917 he left high school to join the Navy and was eventually chief radio electrician in the transatlantic communication service, serving at the Otter Cliffs Radio Station

Otter Cliffs Radio Station

U.S. Naval Radio Station Otter Cliffs was a United States Navy radio receiver facility located in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, south of Bar Harbor, Maine.The station was commissioned on August 28, 1917, under the command of Lt...

 in Bar Harbor, Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

. He then studied at George Washington University

George Washington University

The George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...

, 1919, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, 1920–1924, from which he receive his batchelor's degree in electrical communication. From 1921-1923 he also worked for Melville Eastham

Melville Eastham

Melville Eastham was a noted American radio pioneer and business executive.Eastham was born in Oregon City, Oregon. After high school graduation from Portland Academy, he worked as electrician for a Portland street railway, then moved to New York City in 1905 where he worked for the Ovington X-ray...

's Clapp-Eastham Company.

In 1924 he joined the Western Electric Company, and in 1925 became a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he helped develop short-wave radio receivers and field strength measuring equipment, and designed directional antenna

Directional antenna

A directional antenna or beam antenna is an antenna which radiates greater power in one or more directions allowing for increased performance on transmit and receive and reduced interference from unwanted sources....

s for short-wave radio communication, including his celebrated rhombic antenna

Rhombic antenna

A rhombic antenna is a broadband directional antenna co-invented by Edmond Bruce and Harald Friis, mostly commonly used in HF ranges.- Technical Detail :...

 (1931). Karl Jansky used a steerable Bruce array in his earliest radio astronomy

Radio astronomy

Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The initial detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was made in the 1930s, when Karl Jansky observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of...

 experiments, also in 1931.

Bruce received the 1932 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award

IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award

The initially called Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize provided by the Institute of Radio Engineers , the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award was created in 1919 in honor of Colonel Morris N. Liebmann. It was initially given to awardees who had "made public during the recent past an important...

 "for his theoretical investigations and field developments in the domain of directional antennas", and the Franklin Institute

Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute is a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States, dating to 1824. The Institute also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.-History:On February 5, 1824, Samuel Vaughn Merrick and...

's 1935 Longstreth Award for inventing the rhombic antenna

Rhombic antenna

A rhombic antenna is a broadband directional antenna co-invented by Edmond Bruce and Harald Friis, mostly commonly used in HF ranges.- Technical Detail :...

.

Selected works

• Bruce, E., Beck, A.C., Lowry, L.R., "Horizontal Rhombic Antennas", Proceedings of the IRE, volume 23, issue 1, Jan. 1935, pages 24–46.