Mervin Kelly

Mervin Joseph Kelly was born in Princeton, Missouri, on February 14, 1894. His parents were Mary Etta (née Evans) and Joseph Fenimore Kelly. Mervin's great-great-grandfather had moved from Ireland to Virginia, while his mother's parents were Welsh. Kelly attended grade and high school in Gallatin, and graduated as class president and valedictorian at age 16. His classmates at Gallatin High School called him "our Irish king". Kelly excelled as a student, particularly in chemistry and physics. He had planned to become a mining engineer, and spent a summer working in a Utah copper mine. This experience changed his desired career path, and he switched to a general science course upon his return to the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The heads of the chemistry and mathematics departments volunteered to give him special instruction, and he was appointed as an assistant in chemistry, for which he received free tuition and an annual grant of $300 (). When he graduated in 1914 with a B.S. degree, Kelly decided that he wanted "to make a life in academic research." He taught physics and studied mathematics at the University of Kentucky, receiving his master's degree in 1915. He then went on to the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1918. During his time at Chicago, Kelly was an assistant to Professor Robert Andrews Millikan, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923. == Career ==

After earning his Ph.D., Kelly was offered a job as a research physicist in the engineering department of the Western Electric Company by Frank B. Jewett, who later became the first president of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Kelly worked to provide practical vacuum tubes. He worked with Clinton Davisson at the time, and later described him as "perhaps my closest friend." Kelly's work on vacuum tubes as a researcher and later production chief resulted in the longevity of Western Electric telephone repeater tubes increasing from 1,000 to 80,000 hours. Kelly remarked: "Progress has been made in some fields of technology in a four‐year interval that, under normal conditions of peace, would have required from 10 to 20 years." Kelly was acknowledged in the 1956 Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Kelly became executive vice-president of Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1944, and was promoted to president in 1951. Kelly served on the company's board of directors beginning in 1944, and was named chairman of the board of directors on January 1, 1959. He was also a director of the Sandia Corporation, a subsidiary of the Western Electric Company, from 1952 through 1958. In addition, he was a director of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, Bausch & Lomb, Tung-Sol, and the Economic Club of New York. Kelly retired from Bell Telephone Laboratories on March 1, 1959. == Personal life and death ==

On November 11, 1915, Kelly married Katherine Milsted. He once described her as his "most candid critic". He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Gulf of Mexico. ==Awards and recognition==

Kelly was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Acoustical Society of America, and the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences; the honor societies Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu; and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For his contributions to the American war effort, Kelly was awarded the Presidential Certificate of Merit in 1947. Kelly was inaugural winner of the award, in 1960. The Mervin J. Kelly Award ran until 1975. ==References==