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1 Poniatoff, Alexander Mathew
[br]b. 25 March 1892 Kazan District, Russiad. 24 October 1980[br]Russian (naturalized American in 1932) electrical engineer responsible for the development of the professional tape recorder and the first commercially-successful video tape recorder (VTR).[br]Poniatoff was educated at the University of Kazan, the Imperial College in Moscow, and the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, gaining degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering. He was in Germany when the First World War broke out, but he managed to escape back to Russia, where he served as an Air Force pilot with the Imperial Russian Navy. During the Russian Revolution he was a pilot with the White Russian Forces, and escaped into China in 1920; there he found work as an assistant engineer in the Shanghai Power Company. In 1927 he immigrated to the USA, becoming a US citizen in 1932. He obtained a post in the research and development department of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, and later at Dalmo Victor, San Carlos, California. During the Second World War he was involved in the development of airborne radar for the US Navy.In 1944, taking his initials to form the title, Poniatoff founded the AMPEX Corporation to manufacture components for the airborne radar developed at General Electric, but in 1946 he turned to the production of audio tape recorders developed from the German wartime Telefunken Magnetophon machine (the first tape recorder in the truest sense). In this he was supported by the entertainer Bing Crosby, who needed high-quality replay facilities for broadcasting purposes, and in 1947 he was able to offer a professional-quality product and the business prospered.With the rapid post-war boom in television broadcasting in the USA, a need soon arose for a video recorder to provide "time-shifting" of live TV programmes between the different US time zones. Many companies therefore endeavoured to produce a video tape recorder (VTR) using the same single-track, fixed-head, longitudinal-scan system used for audio, but the very much higher bandwidth required involved an unacceptably high tape-speed. AMPEX attempted to solve the problem by using twelve parallel tracks and a machine was demonstrated in 1952, but it proved unsatisfactory.The development team, which included Charles Ginsburg and Ray Dolby, then devised a four-head transverse-scan system in which a quadruplex head rotating at 14,400 rpm was made to scan across the width of a 2 in. (5 cm) tape with a tape-to-head speed of the order of 160 ft/sec (about 110 mph; 49 m/sec or 176 km/h) but with a longitudinal tape speed of only 15 in./sec (0.38 m/sec). In this way, acceptable picture quality was obtained with an acceptable tape consumption. Following a public demonstration on 14 April 1956, commercial produc-tion of studio-quality machines began to revolutionize the production and distribution of TV programmes, and the perfecting of time-base correctors which could stabilize the signal timing to a few nanoseconds made colour VTRs a practical proposition. However, AMPEX did not rest on its laurels and in the face of emerging competition from helical scan machines, where the tracks are laid diagonally on the tape, the company was able to demonstrate its own helical machine in 1957. Another development was the Videofile system, in which 250,000 pages of facsimile could be recorded on a single tape, offering a new means of archiving information. By 1986, quadruplex VTRs were obsolete, but Poniatoff's role in making television recording possible deserves a place in history.Poniatoff was President of AMPEX Corporation until 1955 and then became Chairman of the Board, a position he held until 1970.[br]Further ReadingA.Abrahamson, 1953, "A short history of television recording", Part I, JSMPTE 64:73; 1973, Part II, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 82:188 (provides a fuller background).Audio Biographies, 1961, ed. G.A.Briggs, Wharfedale Wireless Works, pp. 255–61 (contains a few personal details about Poniatoff's escape from Germany to join the Russian Navy).E.Larsen, 1971, A History of Invention.Charles Ginsburg, 1981, "The horse or the cowboy. Getting television on tape", Journal of the Royal Television Society 18:11 (a brief account of the AMPEX VTR story).KF / GB-NBiographical history of technology > Poniatoff, Alexander Mathew
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2 Campbell-Swinton, Alan Archibald
[br]b. 18 October 1863 Kimmerghame, Berwickshire, Scotlandd. 19 February 1930 London, England[br]Scottish electrical engineer who correctly predicted the development of electronic television.[br]After a time at Cargilfield Trinity School, Campbell-Swinton went to Fettes College in Edinburgh from 1878 to 1881 and then spent a year abroad in France. From 1882 until 1887 he was employed at Sir W.G.Armstrong's works in Elswick, Newcastle, following which he set up his own electrical contracting business in London. This he gave up in 1904 to become a consultant. Subsequently he was an engineer with many industrial companies, including the W.T.Henley Telegraph Works Company, Parson Marine Steam Turbine Company and Crompton Parkinson Ltd, of which he became a director. During this time he was involved in electrical and scientific research, being particularly associated with the development of the Parson turbine.In 1903 he tried to realize distant electric vision by using a Braun oscilloscope tube for the. image display, a second tube being modified to form a synchronously scanned camera, by replacing the fluorescent display screen with a photoconductive target. Although this first attempt at what was, in fact, a vidicon camera proved unsuccessful, he was clearly on the right lines and in 1908 he wrote a letter to Nature with a fairly accurate description of the principles of an all-electronic television system using magnetically deflected cathode ray tubes at the camera and receiver, with the camera target consisting of a mosaic of photoconductive elements that were scanned and discharged line by line by an electron beam. He expanded on his ideas in a lecture to the Roentgen Society, London, in 1911, but it was over twenty years before the required technology had advanced sufficiently for Shoenberg's team at EMI to produce a working system.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsFRS (Member of Council 1927 and 1929). Freeman of the City of London. Liveryman of Goldsmiths' Company. First President, Wireless Society 1920–1. Vice-President, Royal Society of Arts, and Chairman of Council 1917–19,1920–2. Chairman, British Scientific Research Association. Vice-President, British Photographic Research Association. Member of the Broadcasting Board 1924. Vice-President, Roentgen Society 1911–12. Vice-President, Institution of Electrical Engineers 1921–5. President, Radio Society of Great Britain 1913–21. Manager, Royal Institution 1912–15.Bibliography1908, Nature 78:151; 1912, Journal of the Roentgen Society 8:1 (both describe his original ideas for electronic television).1924, "The possibilities of television", Wireless World 14:51 (gives a detailed description of his proposals, including the use of a threestage valve video amplifier).1926, Nature 118:590 (describes his early experiments of 1903).Further ReadingThe Proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Television. From Early Days to the Present, November 1986, Institution of Electrical Engineers Publication No. 271 (a report of some of the early developments in television). A.A.Campbell-Swinton FRS 1863–1930, Royal Television Society Monograph, 1982, London (a biography).KFSee also: Baird, John LogieBiographical history of technology > Campbell-Swinton, Alan Archibald
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3 Williams, Sir Frederic Calland
SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology[br]b. 26 June 1911 Stockport, Cheshire, Englandd. 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 DistinctionsKnighted 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.BibliographyWilliams 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 RadiationLaboratory Series.Further ReadingB.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.KFBiographical history of technology > Williams, Sir Frederic Calland
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