Maurice Deloraine grew up in a Protestant environment (Augsburg Lutheranism), his mother from
Clairegoutte, his father from
Frédéric-Fontaine. He then studied at the
ESPCI Paris (35th class). From 1918 to 1921, he did his military service in
Gustave-Auguste Ferrié telecommunications department and, on Ferrié's advice, was hired by
Western Electric.Deloraine discovered the American company's French subsidiary, Le Matériel Téléphonique (LMT), as well as Western Electric's American plants and parent company
AT&T Corporation. Western Electric was taken over by the American holding company
ITT Inc. in 1925, and in 1928 Deloraine founded a research laboratory alongside LMT, Laboratoires LMT (LLMT). LLMT employed 700 people in 1938, when Deloraine set up a direction-finding division within which, in 1940, he developed the process known as "HF/DF" or
High-frequency direction finding, revolutionary in that it made it possible to detect the very short radio signals emitted by German navy submarines without the need for a mobile antenna frame.The name of Deloraine's collaborator,
Henri G. Busignies, a specialist in high-frequency radio procedures, is also associated with this process for locating enemy submarines. In October 1940, Deloraine fled to the United States with Busignies and two other LLMT engineers. The invention of the “Huff-Duff” enabled Allied ships to parry numerous attacks on North Atlantic convoys by enemy submarines, and earned its inventor
Dwight D. Eisenhower congratulations. Back in France, Deloraine got his laboratory up and running again, working on new inventions. Among the most remarkable were the transformation of manual telephone switchboards into automatic ones, and “telephone digitization” (voice encryption in binary). He held a number of positions of responsibility, including president of telephone equipment at LMT, then president of Compagnie générale de constructions téléphoniques. Maurice Deloraine was mayor of
Clairegoutte from 1953 to 1959. Throughout his life, he remained very attached to the “country” of his childhood, and frequently stayed in Clairegoutte. == References==