Mervin Joseph Kelly (February 14, 1894 – March 18, 1971) was an American industrial physicist. He worked at Bell Labs from 1925 to 1959 rising to director of research, then president and eventually chairman.
Early life and education 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. At the time of Kelly's birth, his father was a high school principal. The family soon moved to Gallatin, Missouri, where Kelly's father started a hardware and farm implement business; his salary as a principal was insufficient to raise children. 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". During his school years, Kelly worked various jobs, such as delivering newspapers, driving cattle to pasture for local farmers, and serving as bookkeeper for his father's store. By the time he graduated high school, he had saved enough money for tuition at the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (now, Missouri University of Science and Technology) in Rolla, Missouri; Kelly's family were unable to afford to send him. He later said: "I was really pretty lucky to go to Rolla. In those days, not too many youngsters got to go to college." To support himself, Kelly worked for the Missouri Geological Survey, which allowed him to board in a room above its headquarters. He earned $18 (equivalent to $622 in 2025) a month cataloging and numbering mineral specimens by working nights and weekends. 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 (equivalent to $10,009 in 2025). 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 also researched the applications of acoustics in telephony, thermocouples, electrical ballasts and other communication devices. He worked with Clinton Davisson at the time, and later described him as "perhaps my closest friend." Western Electric's engineering department was separately incorporated as Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925, and Kelly transferred to the new company, where he worked as a research physicist until 1928. He then served as director of vacuum tube development from 1928 until 1934, and development director of transmission instruments and electronics from 1934 to 1936. Between 1922 and 1932, Kelly obtained seven patents related to his work. 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. In 1936 he was appointed director of research at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
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