Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Professor E.L. Bowles

Professor Edward L. Bowles, an electrical engineer who was a pioneer of 
communications engineering at MIT in the 1920s and 1930s and who made 
substantial contributions during World War II, died September 5 in a 
Weston nursing home of Parkinson's disease and a series of strokes. He 
was 92.

A service to remember his career and contributions to the Institute and 
to the nation is planned for this fall, said Professor Paul Penfield 
Jr., head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer 
Science.

Professor Bowles was a member of what then was called the Department of 
Electrical Engineering from 1925 to 1952 and of the  Sloan School of 
Management from 1952 to 1963, when he became emeritus professor.

In a letter to the Course 6  faculty, Professor Penfield said:

Professor Bowles "was one of the key people who led our department into 
a strong program in communications, radio engineering and microwaves 
throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. (Before then, the emphasis here 
had been largely on power.) Bowles, along with Ernst Guillemin, Carlton 
Tucker, and Julius Stratton (who had done his senior thesis under 
Bowles' supervision), developed classroom and laboratory subjects in 
communications. This culminated in Department Head Dugald Jackson asking 
them to set up a new integrated curriculum in 1933."

Professor Bowles is widely remembered for his government work during 
World War II. As a consultant to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 
Professor Bowles was asked to devise a way to combat the German 
submarines that were sinking merchant ships almost at will. Using his 
knowledge of microwaves, he set up a "combat laboratory" at Langley 
Field, Va., where Army Air Corps bombers were equipped with radar 
developed at MIT's famous Radiation Laboratory, which Professor Bowles 
had a hand in establishing. He fitted the planes with electrical 
altimeters, magnetic detectors, homing devices and radio sonobuoys that 
could detect the submarines deep under the surface. Later in the war, at 
the direction of Gen. George Marshall, then military chief of staff, 
Professor Bowles organized a defense against the rocket "buzz bombs" 
Germany had begun using against England. The system succeeded in 
destroying more than 90 percent of the buzz bombs in the air.

In 1945 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his wartime 
efforts.

After the war Professor Bowles was a special consultant to the president 
of Raytheon for nearly 20 years and served on many government boards in 
addition to his work at MIT.

Professor Bowles received the BS from Washington University in St. Louis 
and came to MIT for his master's degree. He did his thesis under 
Vannevar Bush in 1921, the year he began teaching at MIT.

He is survived by his wife, the former Lois Wuerpel, of  Wellesley, and 
two sons, Edmund of White Plains, recently retired from IBM, and 
Frederick of Worcester, who has been hospitalized since his teens as a 
result of infant encephalitis.