Researching John Hogan

Hogan was born in Royton, Lancashire, England.

On 2 January 1915 Hogan married a widow, Margaret Taylor, at St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Shaw Street, Oldham.

Hogan was 30 years old, and a sergeant in the 2nd Battalion, The Manchester Regiment, British Army, during the First World War. On 29 October 1914 near Festubert, France, he performed a deed along with Second Lieutenant James Leach for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Their citation reads:

Hogan, a member of the Sulpician order, was the first rector of Saint John's Seminary in Boston, founded in 1884. From 1889 to 1894, he taught at the new Catholic University in Washington, D.C., but returned to Saint John's Seminary for another term as rector after the death of his successor, Charles B. Rex.

His nephew Dr. John F Hogan DD served as president of Maynooth College in Ireland.

Hogan was born in Philadelphia, constructed his first amateur wireless station in 1902, began his career in 1906 as a laboratory assistant to Lee de Forest, and in 1907 participated in the first public demonstration of the audion tube (triode). From 1908-10 he attended Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University, leaving without a degree to join Reginald Fessenden's National Electric Signaling Co. (NESCO) at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, where he served as a telegraph operator.

While working at NESCO and its successors, Hogan helped develop Fessenden's first crystal detector patent (1910), a patent on single-control tuning (1912), and in 1913 discovered the "rectifier heterodyne" which increased radio receiver sensitivity by a factor of 100. In 1913 led acceptance tests of the U.S. Navy's first high powered station at Arlington, and from 1914-1917 was chief research engineer, working primarily on high-speed recorders for long-distance wireless.

In 1921 Hogan became a consultant performing experiments in mechanical television, FM broadcasting, and facsimile transmission. By the late 1920s, he was broadcasting sound and pictures over his own experimental station, W2XR in New York City which officially went on the air March 26, 1929, having started his experimental transmissions of radio, facsimile, and television in 1928. During the 1930s his experiments with radio facsimile resulted in a machine capable of producing a 4-column newspaper, complete with illustrations, at the rate of 500 words per minute. He sold the station and its FM sister station (by then, WQXR and WQXQ) to The New York Times in 1944.

During World War II, Hogan served as special assistant to Vannevar Bush at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, working on radar, missiles, and the proximity fuze. After war's end, Hogan resumed work on facsimile transmission systems. He died on December 29, 1960, at his home in Forest Hills, Queens.

Throughout his life Hogan was active in professional societies, and in 1912 was instrumental in the formation of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), serving as its president in 1920 and on its board of directors from 1912–1936 and 1948-1950. He was a Fellow of the IRE (1915) and of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1954), and received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1956 "for his contributions to the electronic field as a founder and builder of The Institute of Radio Engineers, for the long sequence of his inventions, and for his continuing activity in the development of devices and systems useful in the communications art." He was also a member of the Joint Technical Advisory Committee from 1948-1960.

Hogan was born to Mary Josephine Forbes and Thomas Sebastian Hogan in Pawtucket in 1894. In 1916 he earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.S. the following year. For 10 months after his latter graduation he traveled in Europe. From 1919 to 1923 he was employed as a designer in the Providence office of architect George F. Hall, the successor to the better-known firm of Martin & Hall. In 1923 he left Hall to open his own office in Providence. He joined the AIA in 1924.

Hogan specialized in buildings for the Catholic church, designing many churches and institutions for the diocese.