76 results found for Hall Of Fame, displaying items 1 - 20
December 1, 2008 Robotics Move From Industry To Space To Elder Care
Retirement isn’t coming easy to 83-year-old Joseph Engelberger, widely known as the Father of Robotics. “There’s a lot that can still be done,” he says wistfully, despite already accomplishing so much in the robotic field. In fact, Engelberger and George Devol produced Unimate, the first industrial robot. While studying for his MS degree at Columbia University, Engelberger worked for Manning Maxwell & Moore as a physicist designing control systems for...
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Doris Kilbane
December 1, 2008 RAM Innovator Took A New Career—And Education—By The Horns
His pioneering work in digital computer technology gave the world reliable random-access magnetic-core memory that revolutionized computer speed and power. Nevertheless, Jay Forrester says his work today is “much more important.” “In 1956, I thought the pioneering days of computer innovation were pretty much over,” Forrester said. “The biggest multiple in improvements in computer speed, reliability, and logical design were from 1946 to ’56. Rapid...
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Doris Kilbane
December 1, 2008 Family Need Leads To A Better Hearing Aid And A New Industry
George Frye was happily working at Tektronix on high-speed sampling oscilloscopes in 1970 when his hearing-impaired mom needed some help. “Her old Zenith hearing aid was getting a little cranky, ” said Frye. She took him up on an offer to build her one. “Transistors had just come onto the market, so I believed I could build it using transistors.” Although it turned out to be a little more complicated than he anticipated, Frye persisted and eventually...
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Doris Kilbane
December 1, 2008 From Sneaking Into Computer Labs To Sneaking Out Java
James Gosling, inventor of the Java programming language and the virtual machine, skipped many of his high school math and physics classes. His teachers knew it, but they still gave him A’s. That’s because, said Gosling, they knew why he was missing the classes. He was working for the physics department at the University of Calgary writing software for satellites. “That attitude was a huge influence on me,” said Gosling. “They understood that learning...
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Doris Kilbane
December 1, 2008 Computers—A Revolutionary Medium For Boosting Human Thought
The printing press was one of the most influential inventions in human history. Could universal personal computing and worldwide networking be just as significant to human thought? In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established a research community to accomplish that grand goal. Quite a bit of this dream was realized in the 1970s by the extension of this community at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) sparked by ideas from...
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Doris Kilbane
December 1, 2008 In AI, Robotics, And Any Field, Stand Alone To Stand Apart
If you want to make a difference, don’t follow the crowd, Marvin Minsky advises today’s students. Don’t go into the most popular field. “That could be a disaster. When I started to work on artificial neural networks, only four other researchers were involved with this field. But today, there are many thousands of them. Interesting discoveries come only every few years—so each researcher has less than one chance in 1000 of making significant contributions,” Minsky...
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Doris Kilbane
October 19, 2007 Paul Baran: Cold War Comm Work Lays Grounds For 'Net Shopping
To maintain the Cold War stalemate with the Soviet Union, the United States knew it had to develop a hefty communications system that could withstand a nuclear strike and allow for retaliation. If the Soviets knew the U.S. could strike back, they would be less likely to attack. Policymakers weren't the only players in prolonging what seemed inevitable. Solutions rested heavily on the shoulders of engineers like Paul Baran. "We could stumble into a...
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Kristina Fiore
October 19, 2007 Aart de Geus: A Simple Question Yields A Complex Career
Some say that asking the right question is more important than having the right answer. But if you're Aart de Geus, you'll do them both, and you'll do them both pretty darn well. Synthesis programming as well as all of the computeraided engineering (CAE) software that designers have used to their advantage started with a simple question de Geus conjured while working at a General Electric plant in North Carolina: Is it possible to do a schematic without writing...
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John Arkontaky
October 19, 2007 Walter O. LeCroy: Engineer, Entrepreneur, Photographer
Walter O. LeCroy made a capital career out of helping EEs do their jobs. The digital and analog oscilloscopes that LeCroy Corp. manufactures allow engineers to test and measure signal voltages. But he found help and a key component for oscilloscopes in the most unlikely of places - not in a dream or from burning the midnight oil, but in a toy store. "I knew it could be done and I was noodling with it," LeCroy said. "Then I was in Toys R Us, and there...
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John Arkontaky
October 19, 2007 Nolan Bushnell: Serious Thoughts About Fun And Games
Nolan Bushnell, popularly revered as the father of electronic games, is still inventing and dreaming of new ways for people to use technology for fun. In fact, he is forging a different direction from today's shoot 'em up, beat 'em down, tear 'em apart electronic diversions. He sees a generation of video games that foster fun, social interaction, and education. "Video games today are a race to the bottom. They are pure, unadulterated trash and I'm sad...
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Doris Kilbane
October 19, 2007 Douglas C. Engelbart: The Mouse That Roared
For better or worse, your computer and its connections to information and other people worldwide were the vision of Douglas C. Engelbart. It all started as he contemplated his impending marriage while driving to work back in 1951. "I was excited about getting married and starting a family, but then I thought I had better focus on work," he said. "Suddenly, in my mind, I saw a big, long hallway going on into infinity with here and there doors on the right...
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Doris Kilbane
October 19, 2007 Don Knuth: The Historian Of The Computer Age
These days, Donald Ervin Knuth spends most of his time in his study, poring over books, papers, and essays in an attempt to finish his life's work, The Art of Computer Programming. Forty years of advances in computer science are congealing, one idea at a time, into a thorough account of a field that this retired Stanford professor helped birth. "I wrote a sentence this morning," Knuth says just after 10 a.m. on the phone from his California home. It's...
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Kristina Fiore
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Ray Kurzweil: Inventor, Futurist, Life Changer
He successfully predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and a computer beating a chess champion. He invented the first print-tospeech reading machine for the blind, the first music synthesizer that could realistically recreate the grand piano, and omni-font optical character recognition (OCR). Now, Ray Kurzweil says we'll be able to eliminate fossil fuels in the next 20 years. And within the next several decades, mankind will live indefinitely. "We will...
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Doris Kilbane
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Andrew Viterbi: The Key To Communications, 40 Years Early
Andrew Viterbi simply wanted to fill in the blanks in several theories when he developed the Viterbi Algorithm. Little did he anticipate its widespread applicability in error-correcting codes in 2 billion cell phones, magnetic recording, most satellite TV receivers, a variety of cable TV systems, voice recognition, and even analyses of DNA sequencing. "When a machine understands your voice, some aspect of my algorithm is in there, improving the accuracy," he says....
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Doris Kilbane
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Charles Proteus Steinmetz: Genius, Forethinker
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was both an electrical engineering genius and a great forward thinker in educational and social issues. In the scientific field, Steinmetz is remembered for many electrically related inventions. He invented a commercially successful alternating-current motor, identified and explained the Law of Hysteresis governing power losses, developed a user-friendly method to manage and calculate values for alternating current, and invented...
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Doris Kilbane
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Arthur A. Collins: A Hero Among Hams
Throughout history, seemingly ordinary men and women have achieved extraordinary things. One such person was Arthur A. Collins. While a select few may have realized his potential at the time, the young Collins appeared to be no different from the other boys who grew up in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "We sensed that Arthur was different, but we did not know that he was a genius," a former neighbor told The New York Times in 1962. "When the rest of ...
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Christine Hintze
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Gordon Gould: The Long Battle For The Laser Patent
From the moment that Gordon Gould first conceived of the laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), he knew his invention would have a lasting effect on every aspect of the world around him. The realization was so great that the young physicist worked feverishly for three days to document his ideas, which would eventually become the source of one of the longest and most bitter patent lawsuits in American history. "When the coffee was made,...
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Christine Hintze
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006 Edward Weston: A Dynamic Electrical Engineer
From the time he took his first job in America at a metal plating factory in 1870 until his death in 1937, Edward Weston strove for perfection. "The fact is that Weston never did and never could relax mentally," wrote David Woodbury in his book, A Measure of Greatness: A Short Biography of Edward Weston. "His preoccupation with whatever he happened to be doing was vast and devastating... His drive to accomplishment was grim and sometimes...
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Christine Hintze
October 20, 2005 William Lear: Aviation Legend Makes Waves In Audio, Too
Don't tell your children this—William Lear left school in the eighth grade and joined the Navy at age 16. Then after World War I, he learned to fly. Partly from those experiences, the designer of the Learjet piloted his genius to create electronic inventions that made an impact on the radio, aviation, and sound industries. Most commonly associated with corporate jets, William Lear earned more than 100 patents for aircraft radios, communications, and...
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Doris Kilbane
October 20, 2005 Joseph F. Keithley: Quality. Service. Innovation. Integrity. QSII.
Early in the history of Keithley Instruments Inc., company founder Joseph F. Keithley passed cards out to employees and customers. These cards read "At Keithley Instruments, we want to be famous for Quality, Service, Innovation, and Integrity (QSII)." Nearly 60 years later, long-time employees use those precise words to describe Keithley the man. They're keys to what made him and his company recognized globally for designing and manufacturing electronic testing...
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Doris Kilbane
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