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Electronics and information technology

  • 1 Electronics and information technology

    [br]
    Byron, Ada Augusta
    Napier, John
    Riche, Gaspard-Clair-François-Marie
    Schickhard, Wilhelm

    Biographical history of technology > Electronics and information technology

  • 2 japan electronics and information technology industries association

    Information technology: JEITA

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > japan electronics and information technology industries association

  • 3 japan electronics and information technology industries association

    Вычислительная техника: ассоциация JEITA

    Универсальный англо-русский словарь > japan electronics and information technology industries association

  • 4 Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

    Information technology: IEICE (organization, Japan)

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

  • 5 Institute of Electronics, information and Communication Engineers

    Information technology: IEICE (organization, Japan)

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > Institute of Electronics, information and Communication Engineers

  • 6 European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Associations

    Electronics: EICTA

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Associations

  • 7 ассоциация JEITA

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > ассоциация JEITA

  • 8 Shannon, Claude Elwood

    [br]
    b. 30 April 1916 Gaylord, Michigan, USA
    [br]
    American mathematician, creator of information theory.
    [br]
    As a child, Shannon tinkered with radio kits and enjoyed solving puzzles, particularly crypto-graphic ones. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936 with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and electrical engineering, and earned his Master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1937. His thesis on applying Boolean algebra to switching circuits has since been acclaimed as possibly the most significant this century. Shannon earned his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940 with a dissertation on the mathematics of genetic transmission.
    Shannon spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then in 1941 joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he began studying the relative efficiency of alternative transmission systems. Work on digital encryption systems during the Second World War led him to think that just as ciphers hide information from the enemy, "encoding" information could also protect it from noise. About 1948, he decided that the amount of information was best expressed quantitatively in a two-value number system, using only the digits 0 and 1. John Tukey, a Princeton colleague, named these units "binary digits" (or, for short, "bits"). Almost all digital computers and communications systems use such on-off, or two-state logic as their basis of operation.
    Also in the 1940s, building on the work of H. Nyquist and R.V.L. Hartley, Shannon proved that there was an upper limit to the amount of information that could be transmitted through a communications channel in a unit of time, which could be approached but never reached because real transmissions are subject to interference (noise). This was the beginning of information theory, which has been used by others in attempts to quantify many sciences and technologies, as well as subjects in the humanities, but with mixed results. Before 1970, when integrated circuits were developed, Shannon's theory was not the preferred circuit-and-transmission design tool it has since become.
    Shannon was also a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, claiming that computing machines could be used to manipulate symbols as well as do calculations. His 1953 paper on computers and automata proposed that digital computers were capable of tasks then thought exclusively the province of living organisms. In 1956 he left Bell Laboratories to join the MIT faculty as Professor of Communications Science.
    On the lighter side, Shannon has built many devices that play games, and in particular has made a scientific study of juggling.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    National Medal of Science. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor, Kyoto Prize.
    Bibliography
    His seminal paper (on what has subsequently become known as information theory) was entitled "The mathematical theory of communications", first published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948; it is also available in a monograph (written with Warren Weaver) published by the University of Illinois Press in 1949, and in Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory, ed. David Slepian, IEEE Press, 1974, 1988. For readers who want all of Shannon's works, see N.J.A.Sloane and A.D.Wyner, 1992, The
    Collected Papers of Claude E.Shannon.
    HO

    Biographical history of technology > Shannon, Claude Elwood

  • 9 Blumlein, Alan Dower

    [br]
    b. 29 June 1903 Hampstead, London, England
    d. 7 June 1942
    [br]
    English electronics engineer, developer of telephone equipment, highly linear electromechanical recording and reproduction equipment, stereo techniques, video and radar technology.
    [br]
    He was a very bright scholar and received a BSc in electrical technology from City and Guilds College in 1923. He joined International Western Electric (later to become Standard Telephone and Cables) in 1924 after a period as an instructor/demonstrator at City and Guilds. He was instrumental in the design of telephone measuring equipment and in international committee work for standards for long-distance telephony.
    From 1929 Blumlein was employed by the Columbia Graphophone Company to develop an electric recording cutterhead that would be independent of Western Electric's patents for the system developed by Maxfield and Harrison. He attacked the problems in a most systematic fashion, and within a year he had developed a moving-coil cutterhead that was much more linear than the iron-cored systems known at the time. Eventually Blumlein designed a complete line of recording equipment, from microphone and through-power amplifiers. The design was used by Columbia; after the merger with the Gramophone Company in 1931 to form Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd (later known as EMI) it became the company standard, certainly for coarse-groove records, until c.1950.
    Blumlein became interested in stereophony (binaural sound), and developed and demonstrated a complete line of equipment, from correctly placed microphones via two-channel records and stereo pick-ups to correctly placed loudspeakers. The advent of silent surfaces of vinyl records made this approach commercial from the late 1950s. His approach was independent and quite different from that of A.C. Keller.
    His extreme facility for creating innovative solutions to electronic problems was used in EMI's development from 1934 to 1938 of the electronic television system, which became the BBC standard of 405 lines after the Second World War, when television broadcasting again became possible. Independent of official requirements, EMI developed a 60 MHz radar system and Blumlein was involved in the development of a centimetric radar and display system. It was during testing of this aircraft mounted equipment that he was killed in a crash.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    Blumlein was inventor or co-inventor of well over 120 patents, a complete list of which is to be found in Burns (1992; see below). The major sound-recording achievements are documented by British patent nos. 350,954, 350,998, 363,627 (highly linear cutterhead, 1930) and 394,325 (reads like a textbook on stereo technology, 1931).
    Further Reading
    The definitive biography of Blumlein has not yet been written; the material seems to have been collected, but is not yet available. However, R.W.Burns, 1992, "A.D.Blumlein, engineer extraordinary", Engineering Science and Education Journal (February): 19– 33 is a thorough account. Also B.J.Benzimra, 1967, "A.D. Blumlein: an electronics genius", Electronics \& Power (June): 218–24 provides an interesting summary.
    GB-N

    Biographical history of technology > Blumlein, Alan Dower

  • 10 De Forest, Lee

    [br]
    b. 26 August 1873 Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
    d. 30 June 1961 Hollywood, California, USA
    [br]
    American electrical engineer and inventor principally known for his invention of the Audion, or triode, vacuum tube; also a pioneer of sound in the cinema.
    [br]
    De Forest was born into the family of a Congregational minister that moved to Alabama in 1879 when the father became President of a college for African-Americans; this was a position that led to the family's social ostracism by the white community. By the time he was 13 years old, De Forest was already a keen mechanical inventor, and in 1893, rejecting his father's plan for him to become a clergyman, he entered the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. Following his first degree, he went on to study the propagation of electromagnetic waves, gaining a PhD in physics in 1899 for his thesis on the "Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires", probably the first US thesis in the field of radio.
    He then joined the Western Electric Company in Chicago where he helped develop the infant technology of wireless, working his way up from a modest post in the production area to a position in the experimental laboratory. There, working alone after normal working hours, he developed a detector of electromagnetic waves based on an electrolytic device similar to that already invented by Fleming in England. Recognizing his talents, a number of financial backers enabled him to set up his own business in 1902 under the name of De Forest Wireless Telegraphy Company; he was soon demonstrating wireless telegraphy to interested parties and entering into competition with the American Marconi Company.
    Despite the failure of this company because of fraud by his partners, he continued his experiments; in 1907, by adding a third electrode, a wire mesh, between the anode and cathode of the thermionic diode invented by Fleming in 1904, he was able to produce the amplifying device now known as the triode valve and achieve a sensitivity of radio-signal reception much greater than possible with the passive carborundum and electrolytic detectors hitherto available. Patented under the name Audion, this new vacuum device was soon successfully used for experimental broadcasts of music and speech in New York and Paris. The invention of the Audion has been described as the beginning of the electronic era. Although much development work was required before its full potential was realized, the Audion opened the way to progress in all areas of sound transmission, recording and reproduction. The patent was challenged by Fleming and it was not until 1943 that De Forest's claim was finally recognized.
    Overcoming the near failure of his new company, the De Forest Radio Telephone Company, as well as unsuccessful charges of fraudulent promotion of the Audion, he continued to exploit the potential of his invention. By 1912 he had used transformer-coupling of several Audion stages to achieve high gain at radio frequencies, making long-distance communication a practical proposition, and had applied positive feedback from the Audion output anode to its input grid to realize a stable transmitter oscillator and modulator. These successes led to prolonged patent litigation with Edwin Armstrong and others, and he eventually sold the manufacturing rights, in retrospect often for a pittance.
    During the early 1920s De Forest began a fruitful association with T.W.Case, who for around ten years had been working to perfect a moving-picture sound system. De Forest claimed to have had an interest in sound films as early as 1900, and Case now began to supply him with photoelectric cells and primitive sound cameras. He eventually devised a variable-density sound-on-film system utilizing a glow-discharge modulator, the Photion. By 1926 De Forest's Phonofilm had been successfully demonstrated in over fifty theatres and this system became the basis of Movietone. Though his ideas were on the right lines, the technology was insufficiently developed and it was left to others to produce a system acceptable to the film industry. However, De Forest had played a key role in transforming the nature of the film industry; within a space of five years the production of silent films had all but ceased.
    In the following decade De Forest applied the Audion to the development of medical diathermy. Finally, after spending most of his working life as an independent inventor and entrepreneur, he worked for a time during the Second World War at the Bell Telephone Laboratories on military applications of electronics.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Institute of Electronic and Radio Engineers Medal of Honour 1922. President, Institute of Electronic and Radio Engineers 1930. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Edison Medal 1946.
    Bibliography
    1904, "Electrolytic detectors", Electrician 54:94 (describes the electrolytic detector). 1907, US patent no. 841,387 (the Audion).
    1950, Father of Radio, Chicago: WIlcox \& Follett (autobiography).
    De Forest gave his own account of the development of his sound-on-film system in a series of articles: 1923. "The Phonofilm", Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 16 (May): 61–75; 1924. "Phonofilm progress", Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 20:17–19; 1927, "Recent developments in the Phonofilm", Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 27:64–76; 1941, "Pioneering in talking pictures", Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 36 (January): 41–9.
    Further Reading
    G.Carneal, 1930, A Conqueror of Space (biography).
    I.Levine, 1964, Electronics Pioneer, Lee De Forest (biography).
    E.I.Sponable, 1947, "Historical development of sound films", Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 48 (April): 275–303 (an authoritative account of De Forest's sound-film work, by Case's assistant).
    W.R.McLaurin, 1949, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry.
    C.F.Booth, 1955, "Fleming and De Forest. An appreciation", in Thermionic Valves 1904– 1954, IEE.
    V.J.Phillips, 1980, Early Radio Detectors, London: Peter Peregrinus.
    KF / JW

    Biographical history of technology > De Forest, Lee

  • 11 Hartley, Ralph V.L.

    [br]
    b. 1889 USA
    d. 1 May 1970 Summit, New Jersey, USA
    [br]
    American engineer who made contributions to radio communications.
    [br]
    Hartley obtained his BA in 1909 from the University of Utah, then gained a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, England. After obtaining a further BA and a BSc in 1912 and 1913, respectively, he returned to the USA and took a job with the Western Electric Laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company, where he was in charge of radio-receiver development. In 1915 he invented the Hartley oscillator, analogous to that invented by Colpitts. Subsequently he worked on carrier telephony at Western Electric and then at Bell Laboratories. There he concen-trated on information theory, building on the pioneering work of Nyquist, in 1926 publishing his law that related information capacity, frequency bandwidth and time. Forced to give up work in 1929 due to ill health, he returned to Bell in 1939 as a consultant on transmission problems. During the Second World War he worked on various projects, including the use of servo-mechanisms for radar and fire control, and finally retired in 1950.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Institution of Electrical and Electronics Enginners Medal of Honour 1946.
    Bibliography
    29 May 1918, US patent no. 1,592,934 (plate modulator).
    29 September 1919, US patent no. 1,419,562 (balanced modulator or detector). 1922, with T.C.Fry, "Binaural location of complex sounds", Bell Systems Technical
    Journal (November).
    1923, "Relation of carrier and sidebands in radio transmission", Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 11:34.
    1924, "The transmission unit", Electrical Communications 3:34.
    1926, "Transmission limits of telephone lines", Bell Laboratories Record 1:225. 1928, "Transmission of information", Bell Systems Technical Journal (July).
    1928, "“TU” becomes Decibel", Bell Laboratories Record 7:137.
    1936, "Oscillations in systems with non-linear reactance", Bell System Technology Journal 15: 424.
    Further Reading
    M.D.Fagen (ed.), 1975, A History of Engineering \& Science in the Bell System, Vol. 1: Bell Laboratories.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Hartley, Ralph V.L.

  • 12 Noyce, Robert

    [br]
    b. 12 December 1927 Burlington, Iowa, USA
    [br]
    American engineer responsible for the development of integrated circuits and the microprocessor chip.
    [br]
    Noyce was the son of a Congregational minister whose family, after a number of moves, finally settled in Grinnell, some 50 miles (80 km) east of Des Moines, Iowa. Encouraged to follow his interest in science, in his teens he worked as a baby-sitter and mower of lawns to earn money for his hobby. One of his clients was Professor of Physics at Grinnell College, where Noyce enrolled to study mathematics and physics and eventually gained a top-grade BA. It was while there that he learned of the invention of the transistor by the team at Bell Laboratories, which included John Bardeen, a former fellow student of his professor. After taking a PhD in physical electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he joined the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia to work on the development of transistors. Then in January 1956 he accepted an invitation from William Shockley, another of the Bell transistor team, to join the newly formed Shockley Transistor Company, the first electronic firm to set up shop in Palo Alto, California, in what later became known as "Silicon Valley".
    From the start things at the company did not go well and eventually Noyce and Gordon Moore and six colleagues decided to offer themselves as a complete development team; with the aid of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company, the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation was born. It was there that in 1958, contemporaneously with Jack K. Wilby at Texas Instruments, Noyce had the idea for monolithic integration of transistor circuits. Eventually, after extended patent litigation involving study of laboratory notebooks and careful examination of the original claims, priority was assigned to Noyce. The invention was most timely. The Apollo Moon-landing programme announced by President Kennedy in May 1961 called for lightweight sophisticated navigation and control computer systems, which could only be met by the rapid development of the new technology, and Fairchild was well placed to deliver the micrologic chips required by NASA.
    In 1968 the founders sold Fairchild Semicon-ductors to the parent company. Noyce and Moore promptly found new backers and set up the Intel Corporation, primarily to make high-density memory chips. The first product was a 1,024-bit random access memory (1 K RAM) and by 1973 sales had reached $60 million. However, Noyce and Moore had already realized that it was possible to make a complete microcomputer by putting all the logic needed to go with the memory chip(s) on a single integrated circuit (1C) chip in the form of a general purpose central processing unit (CPU). By 1971 they had produced the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which sold for US$200, and within a year the 8008 followed. The personal computer (PC) revolution had begun! Noyce eventually left Intel, but he remained active in microchip technology and subsequently founded Sematech Inc.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal 1966. National Academy of Engineering 1969. National Academy of Science. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honour 1978; Cledo Brunetti Award (jointly with Kilby) 1978. Institution of Electrical Engineers Faraday Medal 1979. National Medal of Science 1979. National Medal of Engineering 1987.
    Bibliography
    1955, "Base-widening punch-through", Proceedings of the American Physical Society.
    30 July 1959, US patent no. 2,981,877.
    Further Reading
    T.R.Reid, 1985, Microchip: The Story of a Revolution and the Men Who Made It, London: Pan Books.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Noyce, Robert

  • 13 Pierce, John Robinson

    [br]
    b. 27 March 1910 Des Moines, Iowa, USA
    [br]
    American scientist and communications engineer said to be the "father" of communication satellites.
    [br]
    From his high-school days, Pierce showed an interest in science and in science fiction, writing under the pseudonym of J.J.Coupling. After gaining Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena in 1933, 1934 and 1936, respectively, Pierce joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City in 1936. There he worked on improvements to the travelling-wave tube, in which the passage of a beam of electrons through a helical transmission line at around 7 per cent of the speed of light was made to provide amplification at 860 MHz. He also devised a new form of electrostatically focused electron-multiplier which formed the basis of a sensitive detector of radiation. However, his main contribution to electronics at this time was the invention of the Pierce electron gun—a method of producing a high-density electron beam. In the Second World War he worked with McNally and Shepherd on the development of a low-voltage reflex klystron oscillator that was applied to military radar equipment.
    In 1952 he became Director of Electronic Research at the Bell Laboratories' establishment, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Within two years he had begun work on the possibility of round-the-world relay of signals by means of communication satellites, an idea anticipated in his early science-fiction writings (and by Arthur C. Clarke in 1945), and in 1955 he published a paper in which he examined various possibilities for communications satellites, including passive and active satellites in synchronous and non-synchronous orbits. In 1960 he used the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 30 m (98 1/2 ft) diameter, aluminium-coated Echo 1 balloon satellite to reflect telephone signals back to earth. The success of this led to the launching in 1962 of the first active relay satellite (Telstar), which weighed 170 lb (77 kg) and contained solar-powered rechargeable batteries, 1,000 transistors and a travelling-wave tube capable of amplifying the signal 10,000 times. With a maximum orbital height of 3,500 miles (5,600 km), this enabled a variety of signals, including full bandwidth television, to be relayed from the USA to large receiving dishes in Europe.
    From 1971 until his "retirement" in 1979, Pierce was Professor of Electrical Engineering at CalTech, after which he became Chief Technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, also in Pasadena, and Emeritus Professor of Engineering at Stanford University.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Morris N.Liebmann Memorial Award 1947; Edison Medal 1963; Medal of Honour 1975. Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Award 1960. National Medal of Science 1963. Danish Academy of Science Valdemar Poulsen Medal 1963. Marconi Award 1974. National Academy of Engineering Founders Award 1977. Japan Prize 1985. Arthur C.Clarke Award 1987. Honorary DEng Newark College of Engineering 1961. Honorary DSc Northwest University 1961, Yale 1963, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute 1963. Editor, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 1954–5.
    Bibliography
    23 October 1956, US patent no. 2,768,328 (his development of the travelling-wave tube, filed on 5 November 1946).
    1947, with L.M.Field, "Travelling wave tubes", Proceedings of the Institute of Radio
    Engineers 35:108 (describes the pioneering improvements to the travelling-wave tube). 1947, "Theory of the beam-type travelling wave tube", Proceedings of the Institution of
    Radio Engineers 35:111. 1950, Travelling Wave Tubes.
    1956, Electronic Waves and Messages. 1962, Symbols, Signals and Noise.
    1981, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise: Dover Publications.
    1990, with M.A.Knoll, Signals: Revolution in Electronic Communication: W.H.Freeman.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Pierce, John Robinson

  • 14 Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma

    [br]
    b. 30 July 1889 Mourum (near Moscow), Russia
    d. 29 July 1982 New York City, New York, USA
    [br]
    Russian (naturalized American 1924) television pioneer who invented the iconoscope and kinescope television camera and display tubes.
    [br]
    Zworykin studied engineering at the Institute of Technology in St Petersburg under Boris Rosing, assisting the latter with his early experiments with television. After graduating in 1912, he spent a time doing X-ray research at the Collège de France in Paris before returning to join the Russian Marconi Company, initially in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. On the outbreak of war in 1917, he joined the Russian Army Signal Corps, but when the war ended in the chaos of the Revolution he set off on his travels, ending up in the USA, where he joined the Westinghouse Corporation. There, in 1923, he filed the first of many patents for a complete system of electronic television, including one for an all-electronic scanning pick-up tube that he called the iconoscope. In 1924 he became a US citizen and invented the kinescope, a hard-vacuum cathode ray tube (CRT) for the display of television pictures, and the following year he patented a camera tube with a mosaic of photoelectric elements and gave a demonstration of still-picture TV. In 1926 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Pittsburgh and in 1928 he was granted a patent for a colour TV system.
    In 1929 he embarked on a tour of Europe to study TV developments; on his return he joined the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as Director of the Electronics Research Group, first at Camden and then Princeton, New Jersey. Securing a budget to develop an improved CRT picture tube, he soon produced a kinescope with a hard vacuum, an indirectly heated cathode, a signal-modulation grid and electrostatic focusing. In 1933 an improved iconoscope camera tube was produced, and under his direction RCA went on to produce other improved types of camera tube, including the image iconoscope, the orthicon and image orthicon and the vidicon. The secondary-emission effect used in many of these tubes was also used in a scintillation radiation counter. In 1941 he was responsible for the development of the first industrial electron microscope, but for most of the Second World War he directed work concerned with radar, aircraft fire-control and TV-guided missiles.
    After the war he worked for a time on high-speed memories and medical electronics, becoming Vice-President and Technical Consultant in 1947. He "retired" from RCA and was made an honorary vice-president in 1954, but he retained an office and continued to work there almost up until his death; he also served as Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1954 until 1962.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Zworykin received some twenty-seven awards and honours for his contributions to television engineering and medical electronics, including the Institution of Electrical Engineers Faraday Medal 1965; US Medal of Science 1966; and the US National Hall of Fame 1977.
    Bibliography
    29 December 1923, US patent no. 2,141, 059 (the original iconoscope patent; finally granted in December 1938!).
    13 July 1925, US patent no. 1,691, 324 (colour television system).
    1930, with D.E.Wilson, Photocells and Their Applications, New York: Wiley. 1934, "The iconoscope. A modern version of the electric eye". Proceedings of the
    Institute of Radio Engineers 22:16.
    1946, Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope.
    1940, with G.A.Morton, Television; revised 1954.
    Further Reading
    J.H.Udelson, 1982, The Great Television Race: History of the Television Industry 1925– 41: University of Alabama Press.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma

  • 15 Williams, Sir Frederic Calland

    [br]
    b. 26 June 1911 Stockport, Cheshire, England
    d. 11 August 1977 Prestbury, Cheshire, England
    [br]
    English electrical engineer who invented the Williams storage cathode ray tube, which was extensively used worldwide as a data memory in the first digital computers.
    [br]
    Following education at Stockport Grammar School, Williams entered Manchester University in 1929, gaining his BSc in 1932 and MSc in 1933. After a short time as a college apprentice with Metropolitan Vickers, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study for a DPhil, which he was awarded in 1936. He returned to Manchester University that year as an assistant lecturer, gaining his DSc in 1939. Following the outbreak of the Second World War he worked for the Scientific Civil Service, initially at the Bawdsey Research Station and then at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern, Worcestershire. There he was involved in research on non-incandescent amplifiers and diode rectifiers and the development of the first practical radar system capable of identifying friendly aircraft. Later in the war, he devised an automatic radar system suitable for use by fighter aircraft.
    After the war he resumed his academic career at Manchester, becoming Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the University Electrotechnical Laboratory in 1946. In the same year he succeeded in developing a data-memory device based on the cathode ray tube, in which the information was stored and read by electron-beam scanning of a charge-retaining target. The Williams storage tube, as it became known, not only found obvious later use as a means of storing single-frame, still television images but proved to be a vital component of the pioneering Manchester University MkI digital computer. Because it enabled both data and program instructions to be stored in the computer, it was soon used worldwide in the development of the early stored-program computers.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Knighted 1976. OBE 1945. CBE 1961. FRS 1950. Hon. DSc Durham 1964, Sussex 1971, Wales 1971. First Royal Society of Arts Benjamin Franklin Medal 1957. City of Philadelphia John Scott Award 1960. Royal Society Hughes Medal 1963. Institution of Electrical Engineers Faraday Medal 1972. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Pioneer Award 1973.
    Bibliography
    Williams contributed papers to many scientific journals, including Proceedings of the Royal Society, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Wireless Engineer, Post Office Electrical Engineers' Journal. Note especially: 1948, with J.Kilburn, "Electronic digital computers", Nature 162:487; 1949, with J.Kilburn, "A storage system for use with binary digital computing machines", Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 96:81; 1975, "Early computers at Manchester University", Radio \& Electronic Engineer 45:327. Williams also collaborated in the writing of vols 19 and 20 of the MIT Radiation
    Laboratory Series.
    Further Reading
    B.Randell, 1973, The Origins of Digital Computers, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. M.R.Williams, 1985, A History of Computing Technology, London: Prentice-Hall. See also: Stibitz, George R.; Strachey, Christopher.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Williams, Sir Frederic Calland

  • 16 Kilby, Jack St Clair

    [br]
    b. 8 November 1923 Jefferson City, Missouri, USA
    [br]
    American engineer who filed the first patents for micro-electronic (integrated) circuits.
    [br]
    Kilby spent most of his childhood in Great Bend, Kansas, where he often accompanied his father, an electrical power engineer, on his maintenance rounds. Working in the blizzard of 1937, his father borrowed a "ham" radio, and this fired Jack to study for his amateur licence (W9GTY) and to construct his own equipment while still a student at Great Bend High School. In 1941 he entered the University of Illinois, but four months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was enlisted in the US Army and found himself working in a radio repair workshop in India. When the war ended he returned to his studies, obtaining his BSEE from Illinois in 1947 and his MSEE from the University of Wisconsin. He then joined Centralab, a small electronics firm in Milwaukee owned by Globe-Union. There he filed twelve patents, including some for reduced titanate capacitors and for Steatite-packing of transistors, and developed a transistorized hearing-aid. During this period he also attended a course on transistors at Bell Laboratories. In May 1958, concerned to gain experience in the field of number processing, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. Shortly afterwards, while working alone during the factory vacation, he conceived the idea of making monolithic, or integrated, circuits by diffusing impurities into a silicon substrate to create P-N junctions. Within less than a month he had produced a complete oscillator on a chip to prove that the technology was feasible, and the following year at the 1ERE Show he demonstrated a germanium integrated-circuit flip-flop. Initially he was granted a patent for the idea, but eventually, after protracted litigation, priority was awarded to Robert Noyce of Fairchild. In 1965 he was commissioned by Patrick Haggerty, the Chief Executive of Texas Instruments, to make a pocket calculator based on integrated circuits, and on 14 April 1971 the world's first such device, the Pocketronic, was launched onto the market. Costing $150 (and weighing some 2½ lb or 1.1 kg), it was an instant success and in 1972 some 5 million calculators were sold worldwide. He left Texas Instruments in November 1970 to become an independent consultant and inventor, working on, amongst other things, methods of deriving electricity from sunlight.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal 1966. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers David Sarnoff Award 1966; Cledo Brunetti Award (jointly with Noyce) 1978; Medal of Honour 1986. National Academy of Engineering 1967. National Science Medal 1969. National Inventors Hall of Fame 1982. Honorary DEng Miami 1982, Rochester 1986. Honorary DSc Wisconsin 1988. Distinguished Professor, Texas A \& M University.
    Bibliography
    6 February 1959, US patent no. 3,138,743 (the first integrated circuit (IC); initially granted June 1964).
    US patent no. 3,819,921 (the Pocketronic calculator).
    Further Reading
    T.R.Reid, 1984, Microchip. The Story of a Revolution and the Men Who Made It, London: Pan Books (for the background to the development of the integrated circuit). H.Queisser, 1988, Conquest of the Microchip, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Kilby, Jack St Clair

  • 17 Sinclair, Sir Clive Maries

    [br]
    b. 30 July 1940
    [br]
    English electronic engineer and inventor.
    [br]
    The son of G.W.C.Sinclair, a machine tool engineer, the young Sinclair's education was disrupted by the failure of his father's business. Aged 12 he left Boxgrove preparatory school and went through twelve more schools before leaving St George's School, Weybridge, at the age of 17. His first job was as an editorial assistant on a hobbyist's magazine, Practical Wireless, and his next as an editor at Bernard Books, writing a series of technical manuals. In 1961 he registered Sinclair Radionics and in the following year announced its first product, a micro-amplifier. This was the first of a series of miniaturized radio products that he put on the market while retaining his editorial job. In 1972 he launched the Sinclair Executive calculator, selling originally at £79.95 but later at £24.95. In 1976, the Black Watch, an electronic watch with digital light-emitting diode (LED) display, was marketed, to be followed by the TV1A, a miniature television with a 2 in. (5 cm) monochrome screen. During the latter part of this period, Sinclair Radionics was supported by investment from the UK National Enterprise Board, who appointed an outside managing director; after making a considerable loss, they closed the company in 1979. However, Sinclair Electronics had already been set up and started to market the UK's first cheap computer kit, the MK 14, which was followed by the ZX 80 and later the ZX 81. Price was kept at a minimum by the extensive use of existing components, though this was a restriction on performance. The small memory was enhanced from one kilobyte to seventeen kilobytes with the addition of a separate memory unit. In January 1985 Sinclair produced the Sinclair C5, a small three-wheeled vehicle driven by a washing-machine engine, intended as a revolutionary new form of personal transport; perceived as unsafe and impractical, it did not prove popular, and the failure of this venture resulted in a contraction of Sinclair's business activities. Later in 1985, a rival electronics company, Amstrad, paid £35,000,000 for all rights to existing Sinclair computer products.
    In March 1992, the irrepressible Sinclair launched his latest brainchild, the Zike electric bicycle; a price of £499 was forecast. This machine, powered by an electric motor but with pedal assistance, had a top speed of 19 km/h (12 mph) and, on full power, would run for up to one hour. Its lightweight nickel-cadmium battery could be recharged either by a generator or by free-wheeling. Although more practical than the C5, it did not bring Sinclair success on the scale of his earlier micro-electronic products.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Knighted 1983.
    Further Reading
    I.Adamson and R.Kennedy, 1986, Sinclair and the "Sunrise" Technology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
    IMcN

    Biographical history of technology > Sinclair, Sir Clive Maries

  • 18 Townes, Charles Hard

    [br]
    b. 28 July 1915 Greenville, South Carolina, USA
    [br]
    American physicist who developed the maser and contributed to the development of the laser.
    [br]
    Charles H.Townes entered Furman University, Greenville, at the early age of 16 and in 1935 obtained a BA in modern languages and a BS in physics. After a year of postgraduate study at Duke University, he received a master's degree in physics in 1936. He then went on to the California Institute of Technology, where he obtained a PhD in 1939. From 1939 to 1947 he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, mainly on airborne radar, although he also did some work on radio astronomy. In 1948 he joined Columbia University as Associate Professor of Physics and in 1950 was appointed a full professor. He was Director of the University's Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to 1952, and from 1952 to 1955 he was Chairman of the Physics Department.
    To meet the need for an oscillator generating very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation, Townes in 1951 realized that use could be made of the different natural energy levels of atoms and molecules. The practical application of this idea was achieved in his laboratory in 1953 using ammonia gas to make the device known as a maser (an acronym of microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). The maser was developed in the next few years and in 1958, in a joint paper with his brother-in-law Arthur L. Schawlow, Townes suggested the possibility of a further development into optical frequencies or an optical maser, later known as a laser (an acronym of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). Two years later the first such device was made by Theodore H. Maiman.
    In 1959 Townes was given leave from Columbia University to serve as Vice-President and Director of Research at the Institute for Defense Analyses until 1961. He was then appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967 he became University Professor of Physics at the University of California, where he has extended his research interests in the field of microwave and infra-red astronomy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Astronomical Society.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Nobel Prize for Physics 1964. Foreign Member, Royal Society of London. President, American Physical Society 1967. Townes has received many awards from American and other scientific societies and institutions and honorary degrees from more than twenty universities.
    Bibliography
    Townes is the author of many scientific papers and, with Arthur L.Schawlow, of
    Microwave Spectroscopy (1955).
    1980, entry, McGraw-Hill Modern Scientists and Engineers, Part 3, New York, pp. 227– 8 (autobiography).
    1991, entry, The Nobel Century, London, p. 106 (autobiography).
    Further Reading
    T.Wasson (ed.), 1987, Nobel Prize Winners, New York, pp. 1,071–3 (contains a short biography).
    RTS

    Biographical history of technology > Townes, Charles Hard

  • 19 Forrester, Jay Wright

    [br]
    b. 14 July 1918 Anselmo, Nebraska, USA
    [br]
    American electrical engineer and management expert who invented the magnetic-core random access memory used in most early digital computers.
    [br]
    Born on a cattle ranch, Forrester obtained a BSc in electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska in 1939 and his MSc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remained to teach and carry out research. Becoming interested in computing, he established the Digital Computer Laboratory at MIT in 1945 and became involved in the construction of Whirlwind I, an early general-purpose computer completed in March 1951 and used for flight-simulation by the US Army Air Force. Finding the linear memories then available for storing data a major limiting factor in the speed at which computers were able to operate, he developed a three-dimensional store based on the binary switching of the state of small magnetic cores that could be addressed and switched by a matrix of wires carrying pulses of current. The machine used parallel synchronous fixed-point computing, with fifteen binary digits and a plus sign, i.e. 16 bits in all, and contained 5,000 vacuum tubes, eleven semiconductors and a 2 MHz clock for the arithmetic logic unit. It occupied a two-storey building and consumed 150kW of electricity. From his experience with the development and use of computers, he came to realize their great potential for the simulation and modelling of real situations and hence for the solution of a variety of management problems, using data communications and the technique now known as interactive graphics. His later career was therefore in this field, first at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts (1951) and subsequently (from 1956) as Professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    National Academy of Engineering 1967. George Washington University Inventor of the Year 1968. Danish Academy of Science Valdemar Poulsen Gold Medal 1969. Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Award for Outstanding Accomplishments 1972. Computer Society Pioneer Award 1972. Institution of Electrical Engineers Medal of Honour 1972. National Inventors Hall of Fame 1979. Magnetics Society Information Storage Award 1988. Honorary DEng Nebraska 1954, Newark College of Engineering 1971, Notre Dame University 1974. Honorary DSc Boston 1969, Union College 1973. Honorary DPolSci Mannheim University, Germany. Honorary DHumLett, State University of New York 1988.
    Bibliography
    1951, "Data storage in three dimensions using magnetic cores", Journal of Applied Physics 20: 44 (his first description of the core store).
    Publications on management include: 1961, Industrial Dynamics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; 1968, Principles of Systems, 1971, Urban Dynamics, 1980, with A.A.Legasto \& J.M.Lyneis, System Dynamics, North Holland. 1975, Collected Papers, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
    Further Reading
    K.C.Redmond \& T.M.Smith, Project Whirlwind, the History of a Pioneer Computer (provides details of the Whirlwind computer).
    H.H.Goldstine, 1993, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton University Press (for more general background to the development of computers).
    Serrell et al., 1962, "Evolution of computing machines", Proceedings of the Institute of
    Radio Engineers 1,047.
    M.R.Williams, 1975, History of Computing Technology, London: Prentice-Hall.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Forrester, Jay Wright

  • 20 Kompfner, Rudolph

    [br]
    b. 16 May 1909 Vienna, Austria
    d. 3 December 1977 Stanford, California, USA
    [br]
    Austrian (naturalized English in 1949, American in 1957) electrical engineer primarily known for his invention of the travelling-wave tube.
    [br]
    Kompfner obtained a degree in engineering from the Vienna Technische Hochschule in 1931 and qualified as a Diplom-Ingenieur in Architecture two years later. The following year, with a worsening political situation in Austria, he moved to England and became an architectural apprentice. In 1936 he became Managing Director of a building firm owned by a relative, but at the same time he was avidly studying physics and electronics. His first patent, for a television pick-up device, was filed in 1935 and granted in 1937, but was not in fact taken up. In June 1940 he was interned on the Isle of Man, but as a result of a paper previously sent by him to the Editor of Wireless Engineer he was released the following December and sent to join the group at Birmingham University working on centimetric radar. There he worked on klystrons, with little success, but as a result of the experience gained he eventually invented the travelling-wave tube (TWT), which was based on a helical transmission line. After disbandment of the Birmingham team, in 1946 Kompfner moved to the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford and in 1947 he became a British subject. At the Clarendon Laboratory he met J.R. Pierce of Bell Laboratories, who worked out the theory of operation of the TWT. After gaining his DPhil at Oxford in 1951, Kompfner accepted a post as Principal Scientific Officer at Signals Electronic Research Laboratories, Baldock, but very soon after that he was invited by Pierce to work at Bell on microwave tubes. There, in 1952, he invented the backward-wave oscillator (BWO). He was appointed Director of Electronics Research in 1955 and Director of Communications Research in 1962, having become a US citizen in 1957. In 1958, with Pierce, he designed Echo 1, the first (passive) satellite, which was launched in August 1960. He was also involved with the development of Telstar, the first active communications satellite, which was launched in 1962. Following his retirement from Bell in 1973, he continued to pursue research, alternately at Stanford, California, and Oxford, England.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Physical Society Duddell Medal 1955. Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal 1960. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers David Sarnoff Award 1960. Member of the National Academy of Engineering 1966. Member of the National Academy of Science 1968. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honour 1973. City of Philadelphia John Scott Award 1974. Roentgen Society Silvanus Thompson Medal 1974. President's National medal of Science 1974. Honorary doctorates Vienna 1965, Oxford 1969.
    Bibliography
    1944, "Velocity modulated beams", Wireless Engineer 17:262.
    1942, "Transit time phenomena in electronic tubes", Wireless Engineer 19:3. 1942, "Velocity modulating grids", Wireless Engineer 19:158.
    1946, "The travelling-wave tube", Wireless Engineer 42:369.
    1964, The Invention of the TWT, San Francisco: San Francisco Press.
    Further Reading
    J.R.Pierce, 1992, "History of the microwave tube art", Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers: 980.
    KF

    Biographical history of technology > Kompfner, Rudolph

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