In This Episode: When you follow your gut and push to be the best, amazing things can happen. James Flanagan did that, and the domino effect that followed is so amazing, you’ll find it hard to believe that one guy’s efforts are probably a part of your life every day — even though he’s been dead for several years.

Tweet
Jump to Transcript
How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes
Show Notes

* To help support Uncommon Sense, see the Patron’s Page, or the form in the sidebar.
* See the transcript for a couple of photos of Dr. Flanagan.

Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense, I’m Randy Cassingham.
James Flanagan was born on a cotton farm in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1925. In high school, he was given a choice of two extra classes: typing, or physics. He looked up physics to see what it was: “the study of natural phenomena and how to use them,” so he chose that because he figured that could be helpful to a cotton farmer. It changed his life. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he wanted to be a pilot. He failed the color blindness test and was assigned to communications, where he worked on radar — and scrambling radio transmissions so that enemy forces couldn’t hear what someone was saying.
After discharge from the Army, Flanagan earned his bachelor’s degree from Mississippi State University in 1948 in electrical engineering, because of his fascination with the tools he worked with in the Army. He went on to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering at MIT, studying at the school’s Acoustics Laboratory. He then joined the technical staff of the phone company — AT&T’s Bell Laboratories — in 1957, and in just four years rose to be the head of the Acoustics Research Department. This is a guy that, as he grew up, lived in a farmhouse that didn’t even have a telephone. Hell, it didn’t even have electricity until he was 12.
It makes sense that the phone company would want a whizzy engineer who understood acoustics, the branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves, such as sound waves. With his rapid rise, you might get the idea that Flanagan was really something special. Well, and that he’s the subject of the Uncommon Sense podcast pretty much guarantees it!
Edward David Jr., the then-executive director at Bell Laboratories and later science advisor to President Richard Nixon, who actually survived Dr. Flanagan, said, “I hired him because of his interest in speech and hearing — and because he was a prize student. He brought a new look to the whole area of communications.”
Flanagan’s experience with scrambling radio transmissions was key to his career. In those days, it was difficult at best to understand soldiers’ voices on two-way radios — it’s not that great today! Then add in scrambling the voices, which at least was supposed to make speech completely unintelligible, which only is useful when the signal is unscrambled. The recipient has to be able to understand that voice clearly. In the 1940s, that was pretty darned hard. So no wonder he got the best education he could on the subject: clearly he saw challenges, and potential.
That potential was realized pretty quickly. By 1965 his book “Speech Analysis,