George H. Brown
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George H. Brown (1908–1987) was an American research engineer. He was a prolific inventor who held more than 80 patents and wrote over 100 technical papers.
He led the RCA Corporation's efforts to develop a color television system which is still in use today. He was associated with the RCA for over forty years, becoming an executive vice president for research and engineering in November 1961. He received many prestigious awards, including the 1967 IEEE Edison Medal: “For a meritorious career distinguished by significant engineering contributions to antenna development, electromagnetic propagation, the broadcast industry, the art of radio frequency heating, and color television”.
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[edit] Education and early career
George H. Brown was born on 14 October 1908 in North Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, a railway employee, was of Scottish descent, his mother's family was German. He attended high school at Portage, Wisconsin. As a schoolboy he was already experimenting with constructing his own crystal-detector receiver. After graduation he studied electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He was still only a college junior when he spent a summer in the Test Department at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. He won two highly competitive graduate fellowships and received a B.S. (1930), an M.S. (1931) and a Ph.D. (1933) for his work on broadcast antennas and ground systems.
In 1933 Brown joined RCA at Camden, New Jersey, where he conducted research into AM broadcasting antennas that became standard throughout the world.
In 1935 a commission to produce an antenna with omnidirectional radiation, i.e. equal at all points of the compass, led him to develop the turnstile antenna, so-called because it looked like a turnstile. This offered an effective combination of high gain and broad bandwidth with a wave propagation pattern that made it possible to broadcast FM radio and television signals over long distances. To this design he later added an absorbing resistor which resulted in increased bandwidth and permitted the simultaneous radiation of television pictures and sound from the same antenna.
In 1939 he produced a device for enabling high resolution of broadcast television. He named it the “vestigial side-band filter”. It was accepted in January 1939 by the Federal Communications Commission for broadcasting throughout the USA, and it is used throughout the world today.
He moved to the new central research laboratories of the RCA at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1942. By this time he was developing radio and radar antennas for military systems. He was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation from the War Department for his contributions.
He and his colleagues developed a method for speeding the production of penicillin by means of radio-frequency heating techniques. Using inexpensive vacuum pumps and simple condensers it was estimated to be about one-tenth of the cost of freeze-drying. Radio-frequency heating also became used in the manufacture of plastic raincoats, bags and other products.
George Brown made pioneering developments in directional antennas, much of which was published in the Proceedings of the IRE in the mid thirties, and has been republished in several engineering handbooks.
[edit] Color television
While he was still a member of the technical staff at the RCA laboratories heading a small group in antenna and transmitter technology, a team of researchers under Raymond D. Kell had developed a concept of color television that would be compatible with existing black-and-white sets, i.e. color programs could be viewed on existing black-and-white sets, but obviously only in black-and-white.
For many years Peter Goldmark of CBS had been working on a field-sequential method for color involving a revolving disk of color filters placed in front of both the television camera and display tubes. He now petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval of his field-sequential system for commercial broadcasting in color. Although simpler, the field-sequential system required a higher bandwidth and was not compatible with black-and-white television because of a different frequency of synchronization. Adoption of this system would therefore have made all existing television sets redundant. The RCA Lab approach, called “simultaneous color television”, was more complex and also required a higher bandwidth, but it was compatible with existing sets.
David Sarnoff, president of RCA, charged Brown to coordinate the effort of several working groups for a demonstration. During a short, intensive period major improvements in the system were invented, reducing the required bandwidth and improving compatibility.
In the RCA Laboratories Brown's team developed the dot-sequential color television system, relentlessly pursuing its adoption as the U.S. standard for broadcasting. At first the U.S. television industry rejected the compatible dot-sequential system, preferring the incompatible field-sequential method. However, three years later the U.S. standard reverted to the dot-sequential system.
The principles embodied in the dot-sequential system are incorporated in all present-day systems of color television, including NTSC (National Television Systems Committee), PAL (Phase-Alternating Line), and SECAM (Sequentiel Couleur avec Memoire).
[edit] Promotions, awards, and honors
Brown had an illustrious career with RCA, becoming director of the Systems Research Laboratory in 1952, chief engineer, Commercial and Industrial Electronic Products at Camden in 1957, vice-president, Research and Engineering, in 1961, and executive vice-president, Patents and Licensing, in 1968. He was a member of the RCA board of directors from 1965 until his retirement in 1972.
He was a fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) before the merger of those two societies into the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Television Society. In 1972 he gave the prestigious Shoenberg Memorial Lecture at the Royal Institution. He received many awards: the De Forest Audion Award of the Veteran Wireless Operators Association in 1968, and an honorary D.Eng. from the University of Rhode Island in 1968.
[edit] Personality
George Brown was a notable personality and powerful communicator and was widely sought as an after-dinner speaker, on which occasions he could be informative as well as witty, spicing his speeches with many amusing anecdotes. He hated pomposity, and several people who tried to conceal ignorance or incompetence became victims of his acerbic wit in his memoirs.
He could also appear modest. On one occasion someone introduced him –somewhat inaccurately – as the greatest mathematician in the USA. He quickly protested: “Oh, please don’t say that. Just say: the greatest mathematician in Mercer Road”. The joke was that he lived in the same road in Princeton as Albert Einstein and Hermann Weyl.
[edit] Family life
George Brown married in December 1932. His wife, Elizabeth Ward, was also a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. She was a loyal support to him during more than fifty years of marriage, always sharing the interests of his professional life. Their twin sons were born in 1934.
Brown devoted much time during his early retirement to the writing of his memoirs which are full of entertaining anecdotes as well as constituting a first-hand account of the history of the technical development of television broadcasting.
He died on 11 December 1987, aged 79, at his home in Princeton after a long illness.
[edit] References
- tribute article in IEEE Annual Banquet Brochure 1967
- National Academies Press, Memorial Tributes: National Academy of Engineering Vol 4 (1991)
- George Brown: “and part of which I was – Recollections of a Research Engineer” (Angus Cupar Publishers, 117 Hunt Drive, Princeton, New Jersey, 1982; Library of Congress Catalog Card no 82-72256)
