Obituaries

Philip N. BridgesNSA Code-Breaker

Philip Newell Bridges, 92, a code-breaker for the National Security Agency and predecessor agencies for 30 years, died Dec. 7 at his home in the Montgomery County community of Ashton. He had acute tubular necrosis, a form of kidney failure.

Mr. Bridges, who retired in 1973, was a member of the Phoenix Society, an organization of retired NSA employees, and edited several of its publications. He also started a printing business focused on scholarly quarterlies.

He was born in New York and raised in Leonia, N.J. His father, geneticist Calvin B. Bridges, was a close and renowned associate of Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the 1933 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering in the role played by the chromosome in heredity.

After his father's death in 1938, Mr. Bridges received a grant from the Carnegie Institution to complete his father's work mapping the chromosome of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He also published the findings.

At the time, Mr. Bridges was a recent Phi Beta Kappa biology graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and had received a master's degree in zoology from Columbia University.

During World War II, he was recruited by the Navy as a civilian cryptanalyst and continued in that profession until retirement.

His wife of 64 years, Marjorie Lismer Bridges, died in 2006.

Survivors include three daughters, Barbara Bell of Harrisburg, Pa., Carolyn Bridges of Cromwell, Conn., and Janet Cauffiel of Gaithersburg; a sister; and a granddaughter.

-- Adam Bernstein