These days, I’m spending a lot of time wrapping my head around the relationship between the frequency and the time responses of filters. In doing so, I’m digging into the concept of “Q”, of course. As a result, I’m reading my old books and some Internet sites, and I’m frequently presented with something like the following:

That, of course, is from the Wikipedia entry on “Q”.

However, in the Bell Telephone System Technical Publication – Monograph 2491, called “The Story of Q” by Estill I. Green ( published in the American Scientist, Vol 43, pp 584-594, in October 1955), it states:

“For a time, Johnson* designated the ratio of reactance to effective resistance of a coil by the symbol K. It was in 1920, while working the practical application of the wave filter which G. A. Campbell had invented some years before, that he for the first time employed the symbol Q for his parameter. His reason for choosing Q was quite simple. He says that it did not stand for ‘quality factor’ or anything else, but since the other letters of the alphabet had already been pre-empted for other purposes, Q was all he had left.”

So, if we’re going to be pedantic (which I love to be) there are two errors on that Wikipedia page. Firstly, Q does not stand for Quality. Secondly, it’s not the “Q factor”, it’s just the “Q”.

As an aside, that monograph is not only informative, it’s fun to read (depending, of course, on your definition of “fun”). For example, near the end of the paper, Green applies Q to rotating bodies (which is not a surprise, since an audio-wave oscillation is just a rotation represented in two dimensions). In that section, he points out that the rotation of the earth is slowing down due, in part, to tidal friction. Consequently, the length of a day is increasing at a rate of 0.00164 second per century, which would make the Q of the rotation of the earth equal to about 10,000,000,000,000 (10^13).

* K.S. Johnson worked in the Western Electric Company’s Engineering Department, which became Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925.