Arthur Andrews Collins (September 9, 1909 – February 25, 1987) was an American radio engineer and entrepreneur. He first gained national recognition as a teenager for significant advances in radio communication. He later founded his own radio engineering and manufacturing company in 1933, Collins Radio Co. Rapidly expanding during World War II, Collins Radio eventually grew into a Fortune 500 leader in avionics, telecommunication, and military, space and commercial radio communications. Collins and his company ultimately became pioneers in melding computer and communication technology.
Early life and education
Arthur A. Collins was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, to Merle H. Collins, a mortgage banker and Faith Andrews Collins, a graduate of Rockford College in Illinois. The family moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when Arthur was 7. His father founded Collins Farms Company in 1925,Collins Farms Company. 1930. A Bulletin of the Collins Farms Company. 24pp. which combined inefficient small farms into one collective enterprise, using the best available equipment and modern practices like contour plowing and erosion control, crop rotation, newly available hybrid seed corn to achieve greatly increased productivity. This novel approach was initially successful but faltered as the Great Depression hit.
Arthur was intensely interested in radio, became a licensed amateur radio operator at age 14, and designed and built his own equipment, purchasing expensive vacuum tubes with his father's help. Arthur Collins became an expert in circuit design and wave propagation, publishing several articles in specialty journals.
Collins became friends with fellow amateur radio "hams", including John Reinartz, who shared a special interest in radio wave propagation. Within the radio spectrum only longer waves were thought to be refracted by the atmosphere ("skip"), allowing long-distance communication at night, but not so the shorter wavelength relegated to amateurs. Reinartz and Collins discovered that such "skip" did occur in the 20-meter range and during the daytime, which allowed long-distance communication with this type of equipment. When Reinartz became the ship's radio operator on the National Geographic-sponsored MacMillan Arctic expedition in 1925 only he and Collins were able to maintain reliable communication, unlike the U.S. Navy using longer wavelengths. Collins gained national recognition.A Culture of Innovation: the Arthur A. Collins Legacy. 2015. Antique Wireless Association & Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association. Documentary DVD, 24 min.Goodyear, Arlo C. 1954. The Collins Story. Privately published, Cedar Rapids, IA. 12pp.Heinemann, F.P. 1996. The Collins Radio Company ingredients of success. AWA Review 10:222-244.Stearns, Ben W. 2002. Arthur Collins Radio Wizard. Privately publ. 394pp.
Arthur Collins graduated from high school in Cedar Rapids and attended Amherst college in Massachusetts, but returned at the end of his freshman year. He never obtained a degree, but rather took courses at the University of Iowa and at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. He is known to have traveled in the late 1930s to Iowa State College to visit John V. Atanasoff, the acknowledged inventor of the first digital computer, although unfortunately, no records exist of their discussions.
Collins own studies, and research done during the early years of his own company, typically outpaced advances in electronics coursework in academia. Yet he valued higher education, promoting programs for his employees to further their education, and even establishing courses with in-house instructors at Collins Radio.
Career Founding of Collins Radio in Iowa Collins founded Collins Radio Co. in 1933, building high quality amateur and commercial transmitters, not receivers for the domestic market. With recognition from success with the MacMillan expedition, Collins equipment was selected for the Byrd Expedition to the Antarctic (1933–1934).Collins Radio Company. 1934. The Byrd Antarctic Expedition II sails with a complete Collins short wave broadcasting station aboard. Collins Signal, January: 1-12 Collins Radio was recognized for excellence in design and manufacture of amateur and commercial transmitters and receivers. It began building aircraft radios in 1935. Beginning manufacturing in his basement, Collins soon rented building space. Braband, K.C. 1983. The First 50 Years. A History of Collins Radio Company and the Collins Divisions of Rockwell International. Rockwell International. 218 pp.
Goddard, RCA, and the Collins vacuum tube patent suit, 1933-1938 The heart of a radio transmitter, the oscillator, at that time used a vacuum tube to generate a radio frequency. Radio Corporation of America claimed it had exclusive rights to the Lee De Forest vacuum tube oscillator circuit patent, and brought suit against Collins Radio and other purported infringers. When Arthur Collins discovered that Robert Goddard 's 1915 oscillator patent predated the de Forest patent Collins met with Goddard to explain that RCA's tube monopoly was a serious impediment to competitive innovation in electronics. With Goddard's help, the practicality of the Goddard design was demonstrated in court; the suit was dropped in 1938, allowing Collins and others to freely develop new technology. Goddard and Collins remained friends until Goddard's death in 1945.McElroy, G. 1997. The Collins 45A-How Arthur Collins met Robert Goddard. QST Feb. 44-46.Anderson, A.E. The Robert Goddard High Frequency Vacuum Tube Oscillator. 1976. Privately publ. Reprinted as c06on273.pub.collins/0-1, A.A.C.Inc. Feb. 15, 1978.
World War II Collins eventually constructed the first Collins Radio factory in Cedar Rapids in 1940. At this time the company had sales of about $500,000 and 150 employees. During World War II Collins Radio became a key supplier of ground, ship, and aircraft communication equipment, expanding from about 350 to a peak of about 3700 employees. Arthur Collins was a co-designer of the Autotune device.Collins, A.A. 1944. History of the Autotune. Address to Collins Radio Technical Association, May 2, 1944. Invented for commercial aviation shortly before the war, it allowed the pilot to remotely switch to preset frequencies. Autotune precisely adjusted the radio in about 40 seconds, without the lengthy hand-tuning normally required by a designated radio operator. The ART-13 100-watt HF military radio was highly prized for this feature and for its rugged and reliable construction. Over 90,000 were built for B-24, B-25, B-29, TBF, and other aircraft. Collins gear was also extensively used for tactical ground communication and aboard ships. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the Corregidor station in the Philippines used Collins equipment to reach the outside world, as did the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay.Goodyear, Arlo C. 1954. The Collins Story. Privately published, Cedar Rapids, IA. 12pp.
Post-war Advances in aviation during World War II led to the rapid post-war expansion of commercial and private aviation. Collins Radio quickly shifted from war-time projects to building communication equipment for the airlines and corporate fleets. A licensed pilot in his 20s, Collins led the pioneering development of the horizontal situation indicator (HSI) and other integrated flight instruments that combined in one display the pitch, roll, and yaw attitudes of the aircraft as well as its compass heading. Collins Radio became a world leader in avionics during the 1950s and 1960s. The 618T HF transceiver was a mainstay for the airlines and the ARC-27, with automatic tuning and 1750 channels, was the first practical UHF military transceiver, in service for over two decades.Haerle, J.M. 1961. Collins Firsts. Internal memo, Oct. 20, 1961. Collins Radio Co.Lamb, T.R. 1974. History of flight control systems at Collins Radio Company. TR 74-26A Rockwell International.
Telecommunication expansion to Texas and California, 1950-1970 Collins expanded his operations to Dallas and Burbank, California in the 1950s. In California he formed a research group under the direction of Mel Doelz to develop new methods of encoding or modulating voice and data signals with precisely shaped pulses that formed a binary code. Such techniques make very efficient use of bandwidth and virtually eliminate the noise and signal distortion that often plagues conventional radio. Based on this research, the Collins KINEPLEXCollins Data Transmission System Kineplex scanned Collins Radio product literature at Archive.org long-distance telecommunication system offered in 1955 up to 40 channels compared to one voice or data channel in the same bandwidth with conventional telephone service. A key component of KINEPLEX was the world's first practical, mass-produced MODEM (modulator/demodulator), in essence, a translator between binary and analog signals. The classified Collins Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) derived from this work.Boslaugh, David L., Ch. 4: Story of the NTDS - Engineering and Technology History Wiki
Collins was among the first to predict the coming computer and telecommunication revolution and led his engineers to combine the lessons of KINEPLEX with communication expertise to establish in the early 1960s a data and message switching facility in Cedar Rapids, using Collins C8400 computers to process a reservation and other data traffic for the airlines. Collins Radio also designed and built microwave communications systems, supplying both the basic equipment and also relay towers, often in remote, mountain top locations, to transmit the line-of-sight signal over long distances. Collins, A.A. 1952. Keynote Address. IRE Conference: Communications. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Collins, A. A. 1969. Telecommunications; The view ahead. pp. 9–13 in Report to Shareholders, Collins 1969 Annual Report. Collins, A.A. 1970. The changing nature of communication systems; Telephone networks; Data networks; New capabilities. pp. 13–17 in Report to Shareholders, Collins Radio Annual Report/July 31. 1970. Collins Radio Company. 1957. Kineplex. Collins Signal. VI (2):16-23. Collins Radio Company. 1957. Kineplex: Collins High Speed Data Transmission System. 25pp.
Later life, 1972-1987 After leaving Collins Radio in 1972, Collins formed a private research and development firm in Dallas, Texas, called Arthur A. Collins Inc ( A.A.C. Inc.). He hired a few key people, some from the old Collins Radio C-System group. His interest was in telecommunication and computer networks, specifically digital switch design for telephone networks, and later computer network design, which he titled "Integrated Service Network" (ISN). AACI developed its own internal email system in 1981, called "Command I". ["I" may stand for 'interconnect'.] Collins published a book on telecommunication entitled "A Time for Innovation", co-authored with Robert Pedersen, and his firm eventually was awarded several patents, some posthumously. Collins worked until his death from a stroke in 1987, having lived long enough to see the advent of the personal computer, the fiber optic cable, and the beginning of the internet.Collins, A.A. 1985. AACI High Speed Digital Switched Network. A.A.C.Inc. 16pp.Collins, A.A. & R.D. Pedersen. 1973. A Time for Innovation. Merle Collins Foundation.184pp.
Work SSB and amateur radios