John Burnette MacChesney II was born in
Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on July 8, 1929, to John Burnette MacChesney I. Raised in
Caldwell, New Jersey, he graduated from
Grover Cleveland High School (since renamed as James Caldwell High School). He received his B.A. degree from
Bowdoin College in 1951, served in the U.S. Army during the
Korean War, and subsequently studied at
City College of New York and
New York University while working in
New York City. In 1959 he received his Ph.D. in geochemistry from
Pennsylvania State University, and joined Bell Labs, examining electrical and magnetic properties of
ceramics and single crystals. In 1972 he turned his attention to glass and then to
erbium and other rare-earth materials for fiber optic amplifiers. MacChesney was an adjunct professor at
Brown and
Rutgers universities, as well as the
Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in
Korea, and held more than a hundred domestic and foreign patents. He received the
Charles Stark Draper Prize (1999), the
John Tyndall Award (1999), the
IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award (1978), and other awards from the
American Ceramic Society, the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the
American Physical Society,
Sigma Xi, and the Research and Development Council of New Jersey. In 1985, MacChesney was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the invention of processes to make glasses for optical fiber and for transfer of these processes to manufacturing. MacChesney died on September 30, 2021, at the age of 92. == References ==