John Battiscombe "J. B." Gunn (13 May 1928 – 2 December 2008), known as Ian or Iain, was a British physicist, who spent most of his career in the United States. He discovered the Gunn effect, which led to the invention of the Gunn diode, the first inexpensive source of microwave power that did not require vacuum tubes. He was born John Battiscombe Gunn, but only used that name in legal documents.
Early life J. B. Gunn was born in 1928 in Cairo, Egypt, to Battiscombe "Jack" Gunn, a leading Egyptologist, and Lillian Florence (Meena) Meacham Hughes Gunn, who studied psychoanalytic technique with Sigmund Freud. In 1931 the family moved to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, while Jack was Curator of the Egyptian Section of the museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. As a young boy he already showed an interest in electronics. As his older half brother Pat (Spike) Hughes, wrote of a visit to Glen Riddle in 1933: "...at 4 years and a few months, Iain was already passionately interested in seeing how things worked, and showed a typical lack of concern for what came out of a loudspeaker, so long as he could make out why it came out at all. Thus at Iain's bedtime every night the Glen Riddle radio set had to be collected up and put together again – mainly for my benefit, for I suddenly felt myself cut off from my New York roots unless I could hear my favourite radio stations." The house at Glen Riddle was later owned by Ken Iverson, an IBM colleague and one of the inventors of APL. The Gunn family returned to England in 1934 when Jack was appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. It was at this point that the younger Gunn rejected the name "John". From then on, he was known personally as "Ian" or "Iain" (the Scottish form of "John"), given to him by his aunt, the Scottish nationalist Wendy Wood. He was known professionally as "J.B. Gunn". Ian was educated in England, with the exception of two years spent at Solebury School, Pennsylvania as a wartime evacuee. He was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1945 to 1948. Official records show that Gunn studied Natural Sciences prelim Class II in 1946, Natural Sciences tripos Class III in 1947, Mechanical Science Class II in 1948 (in the terminology Cambridge used for its curricula) and graduated with a BA degree in 1948, but did not take an MA degree. He described it himself as "I took two years of the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, mathematics and so on. In the last year I was able to switch to electronic engineering, which was something that was just started at Cambridge at that time." His half-brother was the musician Pat (Spike) Hughes, who was 20 years older. Their eccentric family is described in Pat's two volumes of autobiography, Opening Bars and Second Movement. His great-grandfather was the sculptor Samuel Peploe Wood.
Family life While at Cambridge, Gunn spent a "work-study" term at the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) in Malvern, Worcestershire, where he met Freda Pilcher (1924–1975), an Infant School teacher who was working in the RRE library. They married in London in 1950, and had three daughters, Janet, Donna, and Gillian. After Freda's death from lung cancer, he did not remarry.
Research career
Solid state physics and electronics Gunn's first full-time job was with the computer manufacturer Elliott Brothers in London. In 1953 he returned to RRE in Malvern, taking up a post as a Junior Government Research Fellow, where he worked on avalanche injection, carrier accumulation and related topics in experimental semiconductor physics. Gunn left England for North America as part of the post-war brain drain. He first moved to Canada in 1956, to take up an Assistant Professorship at the University of British Columbia, before going to the United States in 1959 to work at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, New York. Gunn stayed with IBM for the rest of his career, spending time on the Corporate Technology Committee, and at the San Jose research lab in California, before returning to Yorktown. He retired in 1990. In 1962, while working for IBM, he discovered the Gunn effect based upon his refusal to accept inconsistent experimental results in Gallium arsenide as simply "noise". This led to the invention of the Gunn diode, a miniature microwave generator. While Gunn recognized the importance of the effect, he was not able to determine the underlying physical process. In December 1964, Herbert Kroemer claimed that the Gunn effect was based upon the Ridley–Watkins–Hilsum effect. Alan Chynoweth, of Bell Telephone Laboratories, showed in June 1965 that only a transferred-electron mechanism could explain the experimental results. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969. Gunn's research papers on solid state physics and electronics relate to microwave oscillations, lattice wave amplification, the Hall effect, quantum electronics, and applications of microwave oscillations to astrophysics.
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