Simon Ramo was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on May 7, 1913 and received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah with highest honors at age 20. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, Magna Cum Laude at age 23 and then joined the General Electric Research Laboratories where he accumulated 25 patents before the age of 30 and was cited as one of America’s most outstanding young electrical engineers. Pioneering in the generation of microwave electricity, he was the first in the U.S. to produce microwave pulses at the kilowatt level and the first to create the so-called cavity resonator magnetron (an approach which later was fully developed by others to become the power source for World War II’s Microwave Radar). His early definitive papers published in the leading technical journals on waves in linear and rotating electron streams detailed the relationships among frequency, stream density, electron velocity and amplification and earned him awards from physics and electrical engineering professional societies.
He developed GE’s electron microscope. He published the first book on the characteristics of microwave electricity and also produced what became a classic textbook on electromagnetic fields and waves (with co-author John R. Whinnery). Used in over 100 universities, it has been a leading text in the field for over 50 years, a new up-dated edition being prepared every 10 years (the most recent included T. VanDuzer as a co-author as well). It has been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, and separately printed in English in India, Japan, and Taiwan. It is safe to say that for five decades, and to this day, most engineers dealing with communication electronics learned their fields and waves fundamentals from this text.