Otto Julius Zobel
Encyclopedia
Otto Julius Zobel was a design engineer who worked for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T)
in the early part of the 20th century. Zobel's work on filter design was revolutionary and led, in conjunction with the work of John R. Carson, to significant commercial advances for AT&T in the field of frequency division multiplex (FDM) telephone transmissions.
Although much of Zobel's work has been superseded by more modern filter designs, it remains the basis of filter theory and his papers are still referenced today. Zobel invented the m-derived filter
and the constant-resistance filter
, which remains in use.
Zobel and Carson helped to establish the nature of noise in electric circuits, concluding that—contrary to mainstream belief—it is not even theoretically possible to filter out noise entirely and that noise will always be a limiting factor in what it is possible to transmit. Thus, they anticipated the later work of Claude Shannon, who showed how the theoretical information rate of a channel is related to the noise of the channel.
. He first studied at Ripon College
, where he received his BA in 1909 with a thesis on Theoretical and experimental treatment of electrical condensers. He later received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Ripon. He then went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated with an MA in physics in 1910. Zobel stayed at the University of Wisconsin as a physics instructor from 1910 to 1915, and graduated with his PhD in 1914; his dissertation concerned "Thermal Conduction and Radiation". This followed his 1913 co-authoring of a book on the subject of geophysical
thermodynamics
. From 1915 to 1916 he taught physics at the University of Minnesota. Having moved to Maplewood, New Jersey
, he joined AT&T in 1916, where he worked on transmission techniques. In 1926, still with the company, he moved to New York and in 1934, he transferred to Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs
), the research organisation created jointly by AT&T and Western Electric
a few years earlier.
The last of his prolific list of patents occurred for Bell Labs in the 1950s, by which time he was residing in Morristown, New Jersey
. He died there in January 1970.
Zobel's early work on heat conduction was not pursued in his later career. There are, however, some interesting connections. Lord Kelvin in his early work on the transmission line derived the properties of the electric line by analogy with heat conduction. This is based on Fourier's law and the Fourier conduction equation
. Ingersoll and Zobel describe the work of Kelvin and Fourier in their book and Kelvin's approach to the representation of transmission function
s would consequently have been very familiar to Zobel. It is therefore no surprise that in Zobel's paper on the electric wave filter a very similar representation is found for the transmission function of filters.
Solutions to the Fourier equation can be provided by Fourier series
. Ingersoll and Zobel state that in many cases the calculation involved makes the solution "well-nigh impossible" by analytical means. With modern technology such a calculation is trivially easy, but Ingersoll and Zobel recommend the use of harmonic analysers, which are the mechanical counterpart of today's spectrum analysers. These machines add together mechanical oscillations of various frequencies, phases and amplitudes by combining them through a set of pulleys or springs; one for each oscillator. The reverse process is also possible, driving the machine with the function and measuring the Fourier components as output.
(AM) SSB has the advantage of half the bandwidth and a fraction of the power (one sideband can have no more than 1/6 of the total power and would typically be a lot less). AM analysed in the frequency domain
consists of a carrier
and two sidebands. The carrier frequency in AM represents the majority of the transmitted power but contains no information whatsoever. The two sidebands both contain identical information so only one is required, at least from an information transmission point of view. Up to this point filtering had been by simple tuned circuits. However, SSB required a flat response over the sideband of interest and maximum rejection of the other sideband with a very sharp transition between the two. As the idea was to put another (completely different) signal in the slot vacated by the unwanted sideband it was important that all traces of it were removed to prevent crosstalk. At the same time minimum distortion (i.e. flat response) is obviously desirable for the sideband being retained. This requirement led to a big research effort in the design of electric wave filters.
George A. Campbell and Zobel worked on this problem of extracting a single sideband from an amplitude-modulated composite wave for use in multiplexing
telephone channels and the related problem of extracting (de-multiplexing) the signal at the far end of the transmission.
Initially, the baseband
pass range used was 200 Hz to 2500 Hz but later the International Telecommunication Union
set a standard of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz with 4 kHz spacing. Thus the filtering was required to go from fully pass to fully stop in the space of 900 Hz. This standard in telephony is still in use today and had remained widespread until it began to be supplanted by digital techniques from the 1980s onwards.
Campbell had previously utilised the condition
discovered in the work of Oliver Heaviside
for lossless transmission to improve the frequency response of transmission lines using lumped component inductors (loading coils). When Campbell started investigating electric wave filter design from 1910, this previous work naturally led him to filters using ladder network topology using capacitors and inductors. Low-pass
, high-pass and band-pass filters were designed. Sharper cut-offs
and higher stop-band rejection to any arbitrary design specification could be achieved merely by increasing the length of the ladder. The filter designs used by Campbell were described by Zobel as constant k filters although this was not a term used by Campbell himself.
method whereby the impedance and transmission parameters of each section are calculated as if it is part of an infinite chain of identical sections.
Zobel invented the m-derived (or m-type) filter
section in 1920, the distinguishing feature of this design being a pole of attenuation close to the filter cut-off frequency. The result of this design is a filter response which falls very rapidly past the cut-off frequency. To use a well known quaint engineer's expression it "goes off like the side of a house". A fast transition between pass-band and stop-band was, of course, one of the primary requirements for cramming as many telephone channels as possible into one cable.
One disadvantage of the m-type section was that at frequencies past the pole of attenuation, the response of the filter started to increase again, reaching a peak somewhere in the stop-band and then falling again. Zobel overcame this problem by designing hybrid filters using a mixture of constant k and m-type sections. This gave Zobel the advantages of both: the fast transition of the m-type and good stop-band rejection of the constant k.
By 1921 Zobel had further perfected his composite filter designs. He was now using, in addition, m-type half sections at the ends of his composite filters to improve the impedance matching of the filter to the source and the load, a technique in which he held a patent. The difficulty that he was trying to overcome was that the image impedance
techniques being used to design filter sections only gave the mathematically predicted response if they were terminated in their respective image impedances. Technically, this was easy to do within the filter as it could always be arranged that adjacent filter sections had matching image impedances (one of the characteristics of m-type sections is that one side or the other of the m-type section will have an image impedance identical to the equivalent constant k section). However, the terminating impedances are a different story. These are normally required to be resistive but the image impedance will be complex. Even worse, it is not even mathematically possible to construct a filter image impedance out of discrete components. The result of impedance mismatch is reflections and a degraded filter performance. Zobel found that a value of m=0.6 for the end half sections, while not mathematically exact, gave a good match to resistive terminations in the pass-band.
Around 1923, Zobel's filter designs were reaching the peak of their complexity. He now had a filter section to which he had doubly applied the m-derivation process resulting in filter sections which he called the mm'-type. This had all the advantages of the previous m-type, but more so. An even faster transition into the stop-band and an even more constant characteristic impedance in the pass-band. At the same time one side would match into the old m-type, just as the m-type could match in to the k-type
. Because there were now two arbitrary parameters (m and m') that the filter designer could adjust, much better end matching half-sections could be designed. A composite filter using these sections would have been the very best that could have been achieved at that time. However, the mm'-type sections never became as widespread and well known as the m-type sections, possibly because their greater complexity has deterred designers. They would have been inconvenient to implement with microwave technology and the increased count of components, especially wound components, made them more expensive to implement with conventional LC technology. Certainly, it is hard to find a textbook from any period which covers their design.
Zobel used a design technique based on his theoretical discovery that the impedance looking into the end of a filter chain was practically the same (within the limits of component tolerances) as the theoretical impedance of an infinite chain after only a small number of sections had been added to the chain. These "image" impedances have a mathematical characterization impossible to construct simply out of discrete components, and can only ever be approximated. Zobel found that using these impedances constructed out of small filter chains as components in a greater network allowed him to build realistic line simulators. These were not in any sense intended as practical filters in the field, but rather the intention was to construct good controllable line simulators without having the inconvenience of miles of cable to contend with.
Perhaps one of Zobel's most fascinating inventions is the lattice filter
section. This section is both constant resistance and flat response zero attenuation across the band, yet it is constructed out of inductors and capacitors. The only signal parameter it modifies is the phase of the signal at different frequencies.
This impedance matching approach not only led to better filters but the techniques developed could be used to construct circuits whose sole purpose was to match together two disparate impedances. Zobel continued to invent impedance matching networks throughout his career. During World War II
he moved on to waveguide
filters for use in the newly developed radar
technology. Little was published during the war for obvious reasons but towards the end with Bell Labs in the 1950s, Zobel designs for sections to match physically different waveguide sizes appear. However, the circuit noted above which still bears Zobel's name today, the constant-resistance network, can be viewed as an impedance matching circuit and remains Zobel's finest achievement in this regard.
.
) noise but those concepts were relatively unknown and little understood at the time despite an early paper by Schottky in 1918 on shot noise. To the radio engineers of the time, static meant externally generated interference. The line of attack against noise from the radio engineers included developing directional antenna
e and moving to higher frequencies where the problem was known not to be so severe.
For telephone engineers, what was then called "fluctuating noise", and would now be described as random noise, i.e. shot and thermal noise, was much more noticeable than with early radio systems. Carson broadened the radio engineers concept of signal-to-static ratio to a more general signal-to-noise ratio
and introduced a figure of merit for noise.
. This led to a famous retort by Carson in a subsequent paper, "Noise, like the poor, will always be with us". Armstrong was technically in the wrong in this exchange, but in 1933, ironically and paradoxically, went on to invent wide-band FM
which enormously improved the noise performance of radio by increasing the bandwidth.
Carson and Zobel in 1923 had conclusively shown that filtering cannot remove noise to the same degree as, say, interference from another station could be removed. To do this they had analyzed random noise in the frequency domain and postulated that it contains all frequencies in its spectrum. This was the first use of Fourier analysis to describe random noise and hence described it in terms of a spread of frequencies. Also first published in this paper was the concept of what we would now call band-limited white noise
. For Zobel this meant that characteristics of the receiving filter completely determine the figure of merit in the presence of white noise and that the filter design was key to achieving the optimum noise performance.
Although this work by Carson and Zobel was very early, it was not universally accepted that noise could be analyzed in the frequency domain in this way. For this reason, the aforementioned exchange between Carson and Armstrong was still possible years later. The precise mathematical relationship between noise power and bandwidth for random noise was finally determined by Harry Nyquist
in 1928 thus giving a theoretical limit to what could be achieved by filtering.
This work on noise produced the concept, and led Zobel to pursue the design, of matched filter
s. This is the concept that the noise performance of the equipment is optimal when the filter is perfectly matched to the signal one is attempting to transmit and is the culmination of theoretical research into the application of removing noise by means of linear filters. This became important in the development of radar during the Second World War in which Zobel played a part.
. The purpose of this research is to attempt to demonstrate that the results obtained from genetic programming are comparable to human achievements. Two of the measures that are used to determine whether a genetic programming result is human-competitive are:
One such problem set as a task for a genetic program was to design a crossover filter
for woofer
and tweeter
loudspeakers. The output design was identical in topology
to a design found in a patent of Zobel's for a filter to separate multiplexed low and high frequencies on a transmission line. This was judged to be human-comparable, not only because of the patent, but also because the high-pass and low-pass sections were "decomposed
" as in Zobel's design, but not specifically required to be so in the programs parameters. Whether or not Zobel's filter design would be good for a hi-fi system is another question. The design does not actually cross over, but rather, there is a gap between the two pass-bands where the signal is not transmitted to either output. Essential for multiplexing, but not so desirable for sound reproduction.
A later genetic programming experiment produced a filter design which consisted of a chain of constant k sections terminated in an m-type half section. This was also determined to have been a design patented by Zobel.
American Telephone & Telegraph
AT&T Corp., originally American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies. AT&T is the oldest telecommunications company...
in the early part of the 20th century. Zobel's work on filter design was revolutionary and led, in conjunction with the work of John R. Carson, to significant commercial advances for AT&T in the field of frequency division multiplex (FDM) telephone transmissions.
Although much of Zobel's work has been superseded by more modern filter designs, it remains the basis of filter theory and his papers are still referenced today. Zobel invented the m-derived filter
M-derived filter
m-derived filters or m-type filters are a type of electronic filter designed using the image method. They were invented by Otto Zobel in the early 1920s. This filter type was originally intended for use with telephone multiplexing and was an improvement on the existing constant k type filter...
and the constant-resistance filter
Zobel network
Zobel networks are a type of filter section based on the image impedance design principle. They are named after Otto Zobel of Bell Labs who published a much referenced paper on image filters in 1923. The distinguishing feature of Zobel networks is that the input impedance is fixed in the design...
, which remains in use.
Zobel and Carson helped to establish the nature of noise in electric circuits, concluding that—contrary to mainstream belief—it is not even theoretically possible to filter out noise entirely and that noise will always be a limiting factor in what it is possible to transmit. Thus, they anticipated the later work of Claude Shannon, who showed how the theoretical information rate of a channel is related to the noise of the channel.
Life
Otto Julius Zobel was born on October 20, 1887 in Ripon, WisconsinRipon, Wisconsin
Ripon is a city in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 6,828. The City of Ripon's official website claims the city's current population to be 7,701. The city is surrounded by the Town of Ripon....
. He first studied at Ripon College
Ripon College (Wisconsin)
Ripon College is a liberal arts college in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. It offers small class sizes and intensive mentoring to students. Ripon has a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa--one of the nation's most prestigious honor societies. Alumni have high rates of success in the workforce as well as acceptance...
, where he received his BA in 1909 with a thesis on Theoretical and experimental treatment of electrical condensers. He later received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Ripon. He then went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated with an MA in physics in 1910. Zobel stayed at the University of Wisconsin as a physics instructor from 1910 to 1915, and graduated with his PhD in 1914; his dissertation concerned "Thermal Conduction and Radiation". This followed his 1913 co-authoring of a book on the subject of geophysical
Geophysics
Geophysics is the physics of the Earth and its environment in space; also the study of the Earth using quantitative physical methods. The term geophysics sometimes refers only to the geological applications: Earth's shape; its gravitational and magnetic fields; its internal structure and...
thermodynamics
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation...
. From 1915 to 1916 he taught physics at the University of Minnesota. Having moved to Maplewood, New Jersey
Maplewood, New Jersey
Maplewood is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the township population was 23,867.-History:...
, he joined AT&T in 1916, where he worked on transmission techniques. In 1926, still with the company, he moved to New York and in 1934, he transferred to Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
), the research organisation created jointly by AT&T and Western Electric
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...
a few years earlier.
The last of his prolific list of patents occurred for Bell Labs in the 1950s, by which time he was residing in Morristown, New Jersey
Morristown, New Jersey
Morristown is a town in Morris County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the town population was 18,411. It is the county seat of Morris County. Morristown became characterized as "the military capital of the American Revolution" because of its strategic role in the...
. He died there in January 1970.
Thermal conduction
Heat equation
The heat equation is an important partial differential equation which describes the distribution of heat in a given region over time...
. Ingersoll and Zobel describe the work of Kelvin and Fourier in their book and Kelvin's approach to the representation of transmission function
Propagation constant
The propagation constant of an electromagnetic wave is a measure of the change undergone by the amplitude of the wave as it propagates in a given direction. The quantity being measured can be the voltage or current in a circuit or a field vector such as electric field strength or flux density...
s would consequently have been very familiar to Zobel. It is therefore no surprise that in Zobel's paper on the electric wave filter a very similar representation is found for the transmission function of filters.
Solutions to the Fourier equation can be provided by Fourier series
Fourier series
In mathematics, a Fourier series decomposes periodic functions or periodic signals into the sum of a set of simple oscillating functions, namely sines and cosines...
. Ingersoll and Zobel state that in many cases the calculation involved makes the solution "well-nigh impossible" by analytical means. With modern technology such a calculation is trivially easy, but Ingersoll and Zobel recommend the use of harmonic analysers, which are the mechanical counterpart of today's spectrum analysers. These machines add together mechanical oscillations of various frequencies, phases and amplitudes by combining them through a set of pulleys or springs; one for each oscillator. The reverse process is also possible, driving the machine with the function and measuring the Fourier components as output.
Background to AT&T research
After the work of John R. Carson in 1915 it became clear that multiplexed telephone transmissions could be greatly improved by the use of single sideband suppressed carrier (SSB) transmission. Compared to basic amplitude modulationAmplitude modulation
Amplitude modulation is a technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting information via a radio carrier wave. AM works by varying the strength of the transmitted signal in relation to the information being sent...
(AM) SSB has the advantage of half the bandwidth and a fraction of the power (one sideband can have no more than 1/6 of the total power and would typically be a lot less). AM analysed in the frequency domain
Frequency domain
In electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, frequency domain is a term used to describe the domain for analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time....
consists of a carrier
Carrier wave
In telecommunications, a carrier wave or carrier is a waveform that is modulated with an input signal for the purpose of conveying information. This carrier wave is usually a much higher frequency than the input signal...
and two sidebands. The carrier frequency in AM represents the majority of the transmitted power but contains no information whatsoever. The two sidebands both contain identical information so only one is required, at least from an information transmission point of view. Up to this point filtering had been by simple tuned circuits. However, SSB required a flat response over the sideband of interest and maximum rejection of the other sideband with a very sharp transition between the two. As the idea was to put another (completely different) signal in the slot vacated by the unwanted sideband it was important that all traces of it were removed to prevent crosstalk. At the same time minimum distortion (i.e. flat response) is obviously desirable for the sideband being retained. This requirement led to a big research effort in the design of electric wave filters.
| Electric wave filters |
| The term electric wave filter was much used around Zobel's time to mean a filter designed to pass or reject waves of specified frequencies across the band. It appears in numerous papers published in the early 20th century. Sometimes used to distinguish these more advanced designs from the simple tuned circuits which preceded them. In modern usage the simpler term filter would be used and is unambiguous within the field of electronics. |
George A. Campbell and Zobel worked on this problem of extracting a single sideband from an amplitude-modulated composite wave for use in multiplexing
Multiplexing
The multiplexed signal is transmitted over a communication channel, which may be a physical transmission medium. The multiplexing divides the capacity of the low-level communication channel into several higher-level logical channels, one for each message signal or data stream to be transferred...
telephone channels and the related problem of extracting (de-multiplexing) the signal at the far end of the transmission.
Initially, the baseband
Baseband
In telecommunications and signal processing, baseband is an adjective that describes signals and systems whose range of frequencies is measured from close to 0 hertz to a cut-off frequency, a maximum bandwidth or highest signal frequency; it is sometimes used as a noun for a band of frequencies...
pass range used was 200 Hz to 2500 Hz but later the International Telecommunication Union
International Telecommunication Union
The International Telecommunication Union is the specialized agency of the United Nations which is responsible for information and communication technologies...
set a standard of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz with 4 kHz spacing. Thus the filtering was required to go from fully pass to fully stop in the space of 900 Hz. This standard in telephony is still in use today and had remained widespread until it began to be supplanted by digital techniques from the 1980s onwards.
Campbell had previously utilised the condition
Heaviside condition
The Heaviside condition, due to Oliver Heaviside , is the condition an electrical transmission line must meet in order for there to be no distortion of a transmitted signal...
discovered in the work of Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations , reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and...
for lossless transmission to improve the frequency response of transmission lines using lumped component inductors (loading coils). When Campbell started investigating electric wave filter design from 1910, this previous work naturally led him to filters using ladder network topology using capacitors and inductors. Low-pass
Low-pass filter
A low-pass filter is an electronic filter that passes low-frequency signals but attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The actual amount of attenuation for each frequency varies from filter to filter. It is sometimes called a high-cut filter, or treble cut filter...
, high-pass and band-pass filters were designed. Sharper cut-offs
Cutoff frequency
In physics and electrical engineering, a cutoff frequency, corner frequency, or break frequency is a boundary in a system's frequency response at which energy flowing through the system begins to be reduced rather than passing through.Typically in electronic systems such as filters and...
and higher stop-band rejection to any arbitrary design specification could be achieved merely by increasing the length of the ladder. The filter designs used by Campbell were described by Zobel as constant k filters although this was not a term used by Campbell himself.
Innovations
After Zobel arrived at the Engineering Department of AT&T he used his mathematical skills to further improve the design of electric wave filters. Carson and Zobel developed the mathematical method of analyzing the behavior of filters now known as the imageImage impedance
Image impedance is a concept used in electronic network design and analysis and most especially in filter design. The term image impedance applies to the impedance seen looking in to the ports of a network. Usually a two-port network is implied but the concept is capable of being extended to...
method whereby the impedance and transmission parameters of each section are calculated as if it is part of an infinite chain of identical sections.
Wave filters
M-derived filter
m-derived filters or m-type filters are a type of electronic filter designed using the image method. They were invented by Otto Zobel in the early 1920s. This filter type was originally intended for use with telephone multiplexing and was an improvement on the existing constant k type filter...
section in 1920, the distinguishing feature of this design being a pole of attenuation close to the filter cut-off frequency. The result of this design is a filter response which falls very rapidly past the cut-off frequency. To use a well known quaint engineer's expression it "goes off like the side of a house". A fast transition between pass-band and stop-band was, of course, one of the primary requirements for cramming as many telephone channels as possible into one cable.
One disadvantage of the m-type section was that at frequencies past the pole of attenuation, the response of the filter started to increase again, reaching a peak somewhere in the stop-band and then falling again. Zobel overcame this problem by designing hybrid filters using a mixture of constant k and m-type sections. This gave Zobel the advantages of both: the fast transition of the m-type and good stop-band rejection of the constant k.
By 1921 Zobel had further perfected his composite filter designs. He was now using, in addition, m-type half sections at the ends of his composite filters to improve the impedance matching of the filter to the source and the load, a technique in which he held a patent. The difficulty that he was trying to overcome was that the image impedance
Image impedance
Image impedance is a concept used in electronic network design and analysis and most especially in filter design. The term image impedance applies to the impedance seen looking in to the ports of a network. Usually a two-port network is implied but the concept is capable of being extended to...
techniques being used to design filter sections only gave the mathematically predicted response if they were terminated in their respective image impedances. Technically, this was easy to do within the filter as it could always be arranged that adjacent filter sections had matching image impedances (one of the characteristics of m-type sections is that one side or the other of the m-type section will have an image impedance identical to the equivalent constant k section). However, the terminating impedances are a different story. These are normally required to be resistive but the image impedance will be complex. Even worse, it is not even mathematically possible to construct a filter image impedance out of discrete components. The result of impedance mismatch is reflections and a degraded filter performance. Zobel found that a value of m=0.6 for the end half sections, while not mathematically exact, gave a good match to resistive terminations in the pass-band.
Around 1923, Zobel's filter designs were reaching the peak of their complexity. He now had a filter section to which he had doubly applied the m-derivation process resulting in filter sections which he called the mm'-type. This had all the advantages of the previous m-type, but more so. An even faster transition into the stop-band and an even more constant characteristic impedance in the pass-band. At the same time one side would match into the old m-type, just as the m-type could match in to the k-type
Constant k filter
Constant k filters, also k-type filters, are a type of electronic filter designed using the image method. They are the original and simplest filters produced by this methodology and consist of a ladder network of identical sections of passive components...
. Because there were now two arbitrary parameters (m and m') that the filter designer could adjust, much better end matching half-sections could be designed. A composite filter using these sections would have been the very best that could have been achieved at that time. However, the mm'-type sections never became as widespread and well known as the m-type sections, possibly because their greater complexity has deterred designers. They would have been inconvenient to implement with microwave technology and the increased count of components, especially wound components, made them more expensive to implement with conventional LC technology. Certainly, it is hard to find a textbook from any period which covers their design.
Transmission line simulation
Zobel directed much of his effort in the 1920s to constructing networks which could simulate transmission lines. These networks were derived from filter sections, which themselves had been derived from transmission line theory and the filters were used on transmission line signals. In turn, these artificial lines were used to develop and test better filter sections.Zobel used a design technique based on his theoretical discovery that the impedance looking into the end of a filter chain was practically the same (within the limits of component tolerances) as the theoretical impedance of an infinite chain after only a small number of sections had been added to the chain. These "image" impedances have a mathematical characterization impossible to construct simply out of discrete components, and can only ever be approximated. Zobel found that using these impedances constructed out of small filter chains as components in a greater network allowed him to build realistic line simulators. These were not in any sense intended as practical filters in the field, but rather the intention was to construct good controllable line simulators without having the inconvenience of miles of cable to contend with.
Equalisers
Zobel invented several filters whose defining characteristic was a constant resistance as the input impedance. The resistance remained constant through the pass band and the stop band. With these designs Zobel had completely solved the impedance matching problem. The main application of these sections has been not so much for filtering out unwanted frequencies, the k-type and m-type filters remained best for this, but rather to equalize the response in the pass band to a flat response.Perhaps one of Zobel's most fascinating inventions is the lattice filter
Lattice phase equaliser
A lattice phase equaliser or lattice filter is an example of an all-pass filter. That is, the attenuation of the filter is constant at all frequencies but the relative phase between input and output varies with frequency...
section. This section is both constant resistance and flat response zero attenuation across the band, yet it is constructed out of inductors and capacitors. The only signal parameter it modifies is the phase of the signal at different frequencies.
Impedance matching
A common theme throughout Zobel's work is the issue of impedance matching. The obvious approach to filter design is to design directly for the attenuation characteristics desired. With modern computing power, a brute force approach is possible and easy, simply incrementally adjusting each component while recalculating in an iterative process until the desired response is achieved. However, Zobel developed a more indirect line of attack. He realized very early on that mismatched impedances inevitably meant reflections, and reflections meant a loss of signal. Improving the impedance match, conversely, would automatically improve a filters pass-band response.This impedance matching approach not only led to better filters but the techniques developed could be used to construct circuits whose sole purpose was to match together two disparate impedances. Zobel continued to invent impedance matching networks throughout his career. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
he moved on to waveguide
Waveguide
A waveguide is a structure which guides waves, such as electromagnetic waves or sound waves. There are different types of waveguides for each type of wave...
filters for use in the newly developed radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
technology. Little was published during the war for obvious reasons but towards the end with Bell Labs in the 1950s, Zobel designs for sections to match physically different waveguide sizes appear. However, the circuit noted above which still bears Zobel's name today, the constant-resistance network, can be viewed as an impedance matching circuit and remains Zobel's finest achievement in this regard.
Loudspeaker equalisation
The name of Zobel is, perhaps, most well known with regard to impedance compensation networks for loudspeakers. Clearly, his designs have applications in this field. However, none of Zobel's patents or articles appear to discuss this topic. It is unclear whether he actually designed anything specifically for loudspeakers. The closest we get to this is where he speaks of impedance matching into a transducer, but here he is discussing a circuit to equalize a submarine cable, or in another instance where clearly he has in mind the hybrid transformer which terminates a line going into a telephone instrument on a phantom circuitPhantom circuit
In telecommunication and electrical engineering, a phantom circuit is an electrical circuit derived from suitably arranged wires with one or more conductive paths being a circuit in itself and at the same time acting as one conductor of another circuit....
.
Noise
While Carson lead the way theoretically, Zobel was involved in the design of filters for the purpose of noise reduction on transmission systems.Background
At the beginning of the 1920s and through to the 1930s, the thinking on noise was dominated by the radio engineers concern with external static. In modern terminology, this would include random (thermal and shotShot noise
Shot noise is a type of electronic noise that may be dominant when the finite number of particles that carry energy is sufficiently small so that uncertainties due to the Poisson distribution, which describes the occurrence of independent random events, are of significance...
) noise but those concepts were relatively unknown and little understood at the time despite an early paper by Schottky in 1918 on shot noise. To the radio engineers of the time, static meant externally generated interference. The line of attack against noise from the radio engineers included developing 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....
e and moving to higher frequencies where the problem was known not to be so severe.
For telephone engineers, what was then called "fluctuating noise", and would now be described as random noise, i.e. shot and thermal noise, was much more noticeable than with early radio systems. Carson broadened the radio engineers concept of signal-to-static ratio to a more general signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise...
and introduced a figure of merit for noise.
Impossibility of noise cancellation
The radio engineers preoccupation with static and the techniques being used to reduce it led to the idea that noise could be totally eliminated by, in some way, compensating for it or canceling it out. The culmination of this viewpoint was expressed in a 1928 paper by Edwin ArmstrongEdwin Armstrong
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Armstrong was the inventor of modern frequency modulation radio....
. This led to a famous retort by Carson in a subsequent paper, "Noise, like the poor, will always be with us". Armstrong was technically in the wrong in this exchange, but in 1933, ironically and paradoxically, went on to invent wide-band FM
FM broadcasting
FM broadcasting is a broadcasting technology pioneered by Edwin Howard Armstrong which uses frequency modulation to provide high-fidelity sound over broadcast radio. The term "FM band" describes the "frequency band in which FM is used for broadcasting"...
which enormously improved the noise performance of radio by increasing the bandwidth.
Carson and Zobel in 1923 had conclusively shown that filtering cannot remove noise to the same degree as, say, interference from another station could be removed. To do this they had analyzed random noise in the frequency domain and postulated that it contains all frequencies in its spectrum. This was the first use of Fourier analysis to describe random noise and hence described it in terms of a spread of frequencies. Also first published in this paper was the concept of what we would now call band-limited white noise
White noise
White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency...
. For Zobel this meant that characteristics of the receiving filter completely determine the figure of merit in the presence of white noise and that the filter design was key to achieving the optimum noise performance.
Although this work by Carson and Zobel was very early, it was not universally accepted that noise could be analyzed in the frequency domain in this way. For this reason, the aforementioned exchange between Carson and Armstrong was still possible years later. The precise mathematical relationship between noise power and bandwidth for random noise was finally determined by Harry Nyquist
Harry Nyquist
Harry Nyquist was an important contributor to information theory.-Personal life:...
in 1928 thus giving a theoretical limit to what could be achieved by filtering.
This work on noise produced the concept, and led Zobel to pursue the design, of matched filter
Matched filter
In telecommunications, a matched filter is obtained by correlating a known signal, or template, with an unknown signal to detect the presence of the template in the unknown signal. This is equivalent to convolving the unknown signal with a conjugated time-reversed version of the template...
s. This is the concept that the noise performance of the equipment is optimal when the filter is perfectly matched to the signal one is attempting to transmit and is the culmination of theoretical research into the application of removing noise by means of linear filters. This became important in the development of radar during the Second World War in which Zobel played a part.
Use of work in genetic programming research
Zobel's work has recently found an application in research into genetic programmingGenetic programming
In artificial intelligence, genetic programming is an evolutionary algorithm-based methodology inspired by biological evolution to find computer programs that perform a user-defined task. It is a specialization of genetic algorithms where each individual is a computer program...
. The purpose of this research is to attempt to demonstrate that the results obtained from genetic programming are comparable to human achievements. Two of the measures that are used to determine whether a genetic programming result is human-competitive are:
- The result is a patented invention.
- The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time of discovery.
One such problem set as a task for a genetic program was to design a crossover filter
Audio crossover
Audio crossovers are a class of electronic filter used in audio applications. Most individual loudspeaker drivers are incapable of covering the entire audio spectrum from low frequencies to high frequencies with acceptable relative volume and lack of distortion so most hi-fi speaker systems use a...
for woofer
Woofer
Woofer is the term commonly used for a loudspeaker driver designed to produce low frequency sounds, typically from around 40 hertz up to about a kilohertz or higher. The name is from the onomatopoeic English word for a dog's bark, "woof"...
and tweeter
Tweeter
A tweeter is a loudspeaker designed to produce high audio frequencies, typically from around 2,000 Hz to 20,000 Hz . Some tweeters can manage response up to 65 kHz...
loudspeakers. The output design was identical in topology
Electronic filter topology
Electronic filter topology defines electronic filter circuits without taking note of the values of the components used but only the manner in which those components are connected....
to a design found in a patent of Zobel's for a filter to separate multiplexed low and high frequencies on a transmission line. This was judged to be human-comparable, not only because of the patent, but also because the high-pass and low-pass sections were "decomposed
Decomposition (computer science)
Decomposition in computer science, also known as factoring, refers to the process by which a complex problem or system is broken down into parts that are easier to conceive, understand, program, and maintain.- Overview :...
" as in Zobel's design, but not specifically required to be so in the programs parameters. Whether or not Zobel's filter design would be good for a hi-fi system is another question. The design does not actually cross over, but rather, there is a gap between the two pass-bands where the signal is not transmitted to either output. Essential for multiplexing, but not so desirable for sound reproduction.
A later genetic programming experiment produced a filter design which consisted of a chain of constant k sections terminated in an m-type half section. This was also determined to have been a design patented by Zobel.