Arthur C. Keller was born in New York City in 1901. He joined the Western Electric Engineering Department in 1917. He attended the Cooper Union Engineering Night school where he earned an engineering bachelor’s degree in 1923. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Yale in 1925 and studied at Columbia University from 1925 to 1929. Arthur joined Bell Laboratories in 1925 as an acoustical engineer. He made multiple improvements to the recording and playing of music. He made the very first stereophonic recording of music in the early 1930s. He invented a new stylus for record players that made possible the playing of high-fidelity recordings. He then moved on to the design and testing of telephone equipment. That was followed by work on sonar, electromechanical instruments and electrical switching equipment.
He retired from Bell Labs as a director of its switching apparatus in 1966. He remained active as a research and development consultant and director on the boards of several corporations. He received 40 American patents in the fields of electromechanics, sound recording and reproduction, sonar, switching apparatus, electronic heating, magnetic tape and telephone systems.
Awards
Keller received two U.S. Navy citations for contributions to sonar systems and devices work during World War II. He was a fellow in the IEEE. He received a gold medal from the Audio Engineering Society on November 1, 1981. He was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.