Harold Black and the

Negative-Feedback Amplifier
Ronald Kline

0 n August 2 , 1927, Harold

Black, a young Bell Labs
engineer just six years out of
with network theory from the
beginning. Like Maxwell’s cir-
cuit equations, which were de-
college, invented the negative v e l o p e d in t h e 1860s t o
feedback amplifier in a “flash understand the induction coil,
of insight” while riding the negative feedback was not tied
Lackawanna Ferry across the to the technology of its origins
Hudson River on his way to (vacuum tubes) and became a
work. (Bell Labs was then lo- fundamental principle of elec-
cated on West Street in Man- trical engineering with innu-
hattan.) Black recalled, “I felt merable applications
an urge to write but had noth- independent of the original
ing to write on so picked up my hardware used for its invention.
moming paper. By sheer coin-
cidence one page was blank. Invention
Here was a perfect set-up, lots The joumey to the Lack-
of room and fully dated. With awanna Ferry began in 192 1 ,
this to implement my job, I when Harold Black (1898-
started the first written record 1983) g r a d u a t e d f r o m
pertaining to the stabilized nega- Worcester Polytechnic Insti-
tive feedback amplifier. Years of tute with a Bachelor’s degree
study and many failures pre- in electrical engineering and
ceded this sudden conception of took a job with the Engineer-
stabilized feedback. Despite im- ing Department at Western
mediate recognition of its im- Electric. (The research branch
portance, years of additional of this department formed the
work were required before it nucleus of Bell Labs when it
found substantial commercial was established in 1925.) A
use” [ 1, p. 7231. pressing problem in the Bell
Negative feedback became system at the time was that the
widespread [2]. It allowed the One of the newspaper pages used by Black to jot down his distortion and instability of
Bell system to reduce over- early ideas on feedbad (Photo: AT&T Archives) vacuum-tube amplifiers were
crowding of lines and extend compounded when they were
its long-distance network by connected in tandem over a
means of carrier telephony. It enabled the long-distance system based on carrier te-
design of accurate fire-control systems in lephony. (Carrier telephony became feasi-
The author is with the College of Engi- World War 11, and it formed the basis of ble in 1917 with the invention of a
neering and the Science and Technolog? early operational amplifiers, as well as practical wave filter by George Campbell,
Studies Department, Coimdl University. precise, variable-frequency audio oscilla- an AT&T researcher who had invented the
Ithaca, NY 148.50. This work ”as support- tors. With the transition from vacuum loading coil independent of Michael
ed by the National Science Foundation. tubes to microelectronics after World War Pupin around 1900.)
Engineering Education Coalition, Synthe- 11, negative feedback retained its status as The gain of the amplifiers varied with
sisproject, headquartered at Cornell Unr- an integral part of communications and plate voltage, temperature, aging of the
wrsity Summer. 1991. control systems because it was associated tubes, etc., while the nonlinearity of the

82 IEEE Control Systems

 high-gain device. Correctly de-
signed, negative feedback re-
duced distortion and noise,
while stabilizing gain by making
it dependent on the passive fked-
back network, instead of the
troublesome active elements
(vacuum tubes). Two other
AT&T researchers, H.T. Friis
and A.G. Jensen, had investi-
gated the feedback caused by the
plate-to-grid capacitance in a
vacuum tube and its influence on
amplification in 1924. They
noted this feedback could in-
creaSe or decrease the amplifica-
tion (i.e., be positiveor negative).
But they regarded plate-to-grid
nuroiu 3 . D L U C K 111 i Y 4 1 W W L J U ~ M UJ rrrc dmplibing equip- feedback as an unwanted phe-
amDlifiers for a num- ,. ‘17g distortion by i.eiwsincg
1 . . . 1
*
nomenon in amplifiers, to be
the umplijier’s output and feeding it back into the in- neutralized by adding a capaci-
ioto: AT&T Arc,hiws) tor, and did not see the benefits
thinking” [4, p. 63) and agreed of negative feedback [9].
to let him pursue the topic, provided it did sought a way to reduce it at the output of Black probably knew about their work
not interfere with his other work. Black the amplifier. This was a critical step and because it was published in the Bell Sys-
approached the problem by trying to make put him on the track to the eventual solu- tem Technic~~l Journal, but it is unclear if
vacuum tubes operate in a more linear fash- tion. it influenced his research. Black recalled
ion, i.e., he wanted to make the active ele- Although resurrected in the 1970s for that he was working on the feedforward
ments of the amplifier produce less single-sideband microwave radio, the and other related topics when he had the
distortion. Mervin Kelly, well-known later feedforward amplifier did not work well insight about negative feedback. Mervin
as the head of Bell Labs when his researchers for carrier telephony in the 1920s. Black Kelly, however, said, “Finally, a mathe-
invented the transistor in 1947, was then in applied for a patent on the invention in matical analysis convinced him that by
charge of electron tube research and coop- February 1925, which was issued in Octo- merely inserting a part of the output power
erated with Black on the endeavor, but to no ber 1928 [6], and then, as a member of a into the input in negative phase, he could
avail [SI. development group at Bell Labs, tried to obtain any desired reduction in distortion
Black then had an important insight make it work in a systems environment. products at the expense of a sacrifice in
that lielped him “reframe” the problem. He built an experimental amplifier to re- amplification. His final mathematical
He recalled that in 1923, “I attended a duce the invention to practice, but precise at?ulwis was conceived while he was
lecture by C. P. Steinmetz [chiefengineer balances and subtractions of signals were crossing the Hudson River on the Lack-
at General Electric] at an A E E meeting hard to achieve and maintain in practice. awanna Ferryboat en route from home to
[the American Institute of Electrical Engi- This was the state of Black’s work on the laboratories” [5,p. 722, my emphasis].
neers, a forerunner of the IEEE] and was telephone amplifiers in 1927, the year of Black had the page of The New Yurk
impressed by the Steinmetz way of getting the famous flash of insight on the Lack- Times witnessed by a co-worker the mom-
down to the fundamentals of a problem. As awanna Ferry. What occurred between the ing of his insight, then set out to build his
a result I restated my assignment as being feedforward experiments and that fateful amplifier and prepare a patent application.
that of removing distortion products from moming on the Ferry is not clear. Negative He submitted an extremely long application
the amplifier output. I immediately ob- feedback was a concept diametrically op- ( 5 2 pages. 126 claims) in 1928, but the
served that by reducing the output to the posed to feedforward and was not an ob- patent office objected to many of the claims,
same amplitude as the input and subtracting vious direction to explore. Black probably apparently because his concept of negative
one from the other, the distortion products knew about the two main types of feed- feedback flew in the face of accepted theory.
only would remain which could then be art- back at the time: I ) the comparison of The examiners finally awarded the patent
plified in a separate amplifier and used to output and input signals to generate an nine years later, in December 1937 [lo],
cancel out the distortion products in the origi- error signal to control the output, which after Black and others at AT&T developed
nal amplifier output ...Thus, the Feedforward had been widely used in mechanical and both a practical amplifier and a theory of
Amplifier came into being” [4, pp. 64-65]. electrical control systems [ 71; and 2) posi- negative feedback.
Although not based on negative feed- tive feedback, which had been used for
back, this amplifier was an essential step to oscillation and increased amplification Development
its invention because Black had reformu- (regeneration) in radio equipment since As Black recalled, the road from the
lated the problem. He was no longer trying about 1913 [8]. But Black took a much Lackawanna Ferry to a practical amplifier
to prevent vacuum tubes from causing dis- different approach. He used negative feed- was long and rocky. He had a difficult time
tortion. He accepted that distortion and back to reduce the amplification of a very with the amplifier “singing” (breaking

August 1993 83
into oscillations) and devised a tance-capacitance tuned vari-
design rule to guard against able frequency audio oscilla-
this instability. In May 1928, tor described in this paper was
Hany Nyquist (1889-1976) and William Hewlett’s contribu-
other communication engineers tion to the paper, and was fur-
at AT&T conferred with Black thermore the foundation on
about using his amplifier for a which the Hewlett-Packard
n e w cable carrier system. Company was built” [ 181.
Nyquist, who received his Ph.D. T h e h i s t o r y of H - P ’ s
in physics from Yale in 1917, founding has elements of the
thought Black‘s design rule was stereotypical story of indepen-
too stringent and did an analysis dent inventors working alone
of negative feedback. This work in a garage. David Packard
led to what later came to be and Hewlett did start their
known as the “Nyquist criterion” company in Packard’s garage
for determining when an ampli- (Hewlett lived in a cottage on
fier with negative feedback was the grounds). But the influ-
stable. He published the paper ence of Stanford and Terman
containing the criterion in 1932 was considerable. Hewlett and
during the patent office delibera- Packard retumed to the area
tions on Black’s patent and after graduating from Stanford
joined Bell Labs in 1934 11 11. in 1934. Packard took a leave
Black recalled, “Although this of absence from GE to accept
criterion is simple in expression a fellowship in 1938, while
and application, Nyquist’s deri- Hewlett retumed to work un-
vation of it required a mathe- der Terman after finishing a
matical-physical intuition given Master’s degree at M.I.T. in
to few men” [ 1, p. 7231. Black’s I
1936. Terman encouraged the
classic paper on the negative A page jrom Harold Black’s notebook, pmhabh lute 1920. pair to form a company to mar-
feedback amplifier, published in (Photo: AT&T ArchivrJ) ket Hewlett’s variable-fre-
1934, referred to Nyquist’s pa- quency oscillator, lent them
per and his stability criterion $538, helped them get a bank
[121. vanced training in mathematics and phys- loan of $1000, and helped them work out
In that same year, during the develop- ics - a common aspect of the history of a deal with IT&T who bought their inter-
ment of a coaxial-cable camer system electronics in this period. national patent rights in exchange for un-
with a passband of 1 MHz and the possi- derwriting their U S . patent application.
bility of several hundred amplifiers, an- Hewlett-Packard and the An early customer for the audio-fre-
other Bell Labs theorist, Hendrik Bode Negative Feedback Amplifier quency oscillators was Disney Studios,
(1905-1982), led a group of mathemati- who ordered eight for the film “Fantasia.”
The application of the negative feed-
cians in the development of design tech- back principle was taken up fairly rapidly By 1940, the fledgling company had nine
niques that took full advantage of Black’s at Stanford University by electrical engi- employees and had moved out of the ga-
invention [ 131. Bode, an applied mathe- neering professor Frederick Terman and rage to develop a full line of products -
matician who received an M.A. from Ohio his students. In 1939, Terman, William based initially on the negative-feedback
State in 1926 and a Ph.D. in physics from Hewlett, Robert Buss, and Francis Cahill amplifier 1 191.
Columbia University in 1935 1141, pub- wrote a paper that described many uses for
lished his paper, “Relations Between At- negative feedback: in a laboratory audio- Common Themes
t e n u a t i o n a n d P h a s e in F e e d b a c k frequency amplifier, an audio-frequency The story of this amplifier illustrates
Amplifier Design,” in I940 [ 151. The pa- voltmeter, a tuned-radio receiver, high-Q many themes in the history of technology.
per, and a resulting book in 1945 (which circuits, and laboratory oscillators. Nega- Although the invention can be traced to a
included what engineers now call “Bode tive feedback resulted in low distortion, “flash of insight” by a single person, the
plots”), used the powerful tools of net- stable gain, and a small phase angle, while inventor was well trained in mathematics,
work theory to show how to design feed- protecting the circuits from the harmful engineering, and science, and had been
back amplifiers with the desired gain and effects of vacuum-tube aging, variable working with others in this area. The devel-
frequency response in a precise manner supply voltages, and so forth. These char- opment of the amplifier was truly a team
[16]. Thus, although Black is usually rec- acteristics were of high value in precision effort at Bell Labs; theorists with excellent
ognized as the inventor of the negative voltmeters, oscilloscopes, and oscillators. mathematical skills developed a theory that
feedback amplifier, its development and Terman, who often is called the founder of helped engineers understand the original in-
the recognition of its possibilities in com- what came to be known as “Silicon Valley” vention and develop it further. The applica-
munications, measurements, and control because of his promotion of commercial ties tion of the invention by Hewlett and Packard
systems were the result of a group effort between Stanford and local electronics firms not only started a new business, but rein-
between engineers and theorists with ad- 1171, recalled in the 1970s that the “resis- forced the connections between the univer-

84 IEEE Control Systems

sity and the electronics industry that b e
came a characteristic of what people later
called the Silicon Valley style of inven-
tion. Thus, the history of the negative-
f e e d b a c k a m p l i f i e r is an excellent
example of the complex interplay between
theory, experiment, and practice in the
institutional settings of established indus-
trial research labs, booming businesses,
and expanding universities that became
common in the U S . electronics industry
after World War I1 [20].
Acknowledgment
The author thanks Richard Compton
and Sheldon Hochheiser for reading an
earlier draft of this paper.
References
[ I ] Harold Black,"Invention in engineering,"Elec..
Eng., vol. 77, pp. 722-723, Aug. 1958.
[2] Stuart Bennett, A History ofControl Eri,qirieer-
ing, 1800-1930. London: Peter Peregrinus. 1979.
[3] Harold S. Black, "Inventing the negative feed-
back amplifier," IEEE Spe(./rum,vol. 14. pp. 54-
60, Dec. 1977.
[4] E.F. O'Neill, Ed., A History of Erigirzeer-irz,q
and Science in the Bell System: Trunsmissiori
Technolog! (1925-1975). Bell Labs. 1985.
i BuildSim'"1.0
i
CORRECTION
The footnote to the article "Sliding
Mode and Classical Controllers in Mag-
netic Levitation Systems," by Dan Cho,
Yoshifumi Kato, and Darin Spilman
(IEEE Contrd Systems Mugu5ne. Feb.
1993, pp. 42) incorrectly identified part
of Y. Kato's company affliation. Kato
was on leave from "Nippondenso Co..
Ltd." (not "NipponDenso Co.," a4
stated in the footnote).
[SI Mervin J. Kelly. "Career of the [I957 AIEE
Lamme] Medalist." Eke. En,?.. vol. 77. pp. 720-
722. Aup. 1958.
[6] Harold S. Black. U S . Patent, 1 686 792, filed
Feb. 3. 1925. issued Oct. 9. 1928.
171 Otto Mayr. Thc Ori,yiris of Fert/huc,k Control.
Cambridge. MA: M.I.T. Press. 1970.
[ X I D.G. Tucker. "The history of positive feed-
hack: The oscillating audion. the regenerative re-
ceiver. and other applications up to around 1923.''
Rutlro K. Elri . E r t , q . vol. 42. pp. 69-80. 1972.
[9]H.T. Fnis and A.G. Jensen,"High kquency ampli-
fier~."BcllS\..\t TCYh ./..vol.3,pp. 181-205.Apr. 1924.
[ I O ] HaroldS. Black,U.S. Patent,? 10267I.filed
Apr. 22. 1932. i\sued Dec. 21. 1937.
[ I I I Harry Nyquist. "Regeneration theory," Bell
. vol. 1 1 , pp. 126-147, Jan. 1932.
S\sr. T ~ l i./..
121 Harold S. Black, "Stabilized feedback ampli-
fiera,"Ekv Eri,q.. vol. 53. pp. 114-120, Jan. 1934;
Bell S\..sr. T K ~ , I. . vol. 13. pp. 1-18, Jan. 1934:
reprinted in James E. Brittain. Tirrriing Points ir7
Amrric~uri Elec.tr.ic.cr/ Histor-y. New York: IEEE
Press. 1976. pp. 343-349.
[ 131 Hennk W. Bode. "Feedback: The history of an
idea." in Selec.tecl P u l ~ r r so r i Mutheniuric,al T r e d
iri Coritrol T/ieoi:\.. Richard Bellman and Robert
Kalaba. Eds. Neu York: Dover. 196.1, pp. 107-124.
The new approach to omulatfon o n the MarJntorh R PC
6 lnte ration
Mehods
1 ~
Reader Service Number 4
[ 14) Mac E. Van Valkenberg. "In Memoriam:
Henrik W. Bode (1905-1982),"IEEETrans.Aut~.
Conri-ol, vol. 29, pp. 193-194, 1984.
1151 Hendrik W. Bode, "Relations between at-
tenuation and phase in feedback amplifier design,''
B e l l S j r t . Tdi..I.,vol. 19, pp.421-454,July 1940;
reprinted in J.E. Brittain, Tuf.riirigPoints iri Ameri-
('at1E/cc.tric.crl Histor\, pp. 359-361.
[ 161Henrik W. Bode. NehwrkAnalysis undFeed-
hod Amplifier De.ri,qn. Princeton, NJ: D. Van
Nostrand. 1945.
[ 171 James C. Williams. "The rise of Silicon Val-
ley." Anio.. Heritage I m w t . Techno/., vol.6, pp.
18-24, Spr./Suin. 1990: and Stuart W. Leslie and
Bruce Hevly. "Steeple building at Stanford: Electri-
cal engineering. physics, and microwave research,"
Proc. LEEE, vol. 73. pp. 1169-1180, July 1985.
[I81 F.E. Terman. W.R. Hewlett et a/., "Some
applications of negative feedback with particular
reference to laboratory equipment," Proc,. IRE,
vol. 27, pp. 649-655, Oct. 1939; reprinted in J.E.
Brittain, Tirrnirz,g Points in American Electrical
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[ I Y ] Tekla Perry. "When the car was out, the
business was 'in'." IEEE Spectrum, vol. 25, pp.
44-45. Apr. 1988.
[20] Ronald Kline. "An overview of twenty-five
years of electrical and electronics engineering in
the Proc.eedi~7,y.\of'rhe IEEE, 1963-1987," Proc.
/EEE. vol. 78, pp. 469-485, Mar. 1990.
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