George Owen Squier
December 23, 1864 - March 26, 1955
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Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1919)
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George Owen Squier was still Chief Signal Officer in the U.S. Army when he was elected to the NAS in 1919. His invention in 1910 of "multiplexing" allowed telephone wires to carry multiple messages for the first time; the carrier frequency principle involved was later adapted to other types of transmission, including FM radio. After graduation from West Point in 1887, Squier received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1893, making him perhaps the first member of the Army's officer corps to hold that degree.
Assigned to the Army Signal Corps after serving in the Spanish-American War, he worked on improving the Army's wireless telegraphy and telephony. In 1908 he became the first passenger to fly in an airplane, and subsequently helped set up the Air Service, forerunner of today's U.S. Air Force, within the Army's Signal Corps. His 1917 address to the National Research Council on military aviation problems was a virtual blueprint for the work the Research Council eventually performed in that area. Shortly before his retirement in 1924, Squier turned his attention to a new application of the transmission technologies he helped to develop: piped-in music. His idea led to the establishment in 1922 of the music service Wired Radio, which is much better known by its present name, given it by Squier shortly before his death: Muzak.
