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George Harold Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born | 14 October 1908 |
| Died | 11 December 1987 (1987-12-12) (aged 79) |
| Nationality | American |
| Engineering career | |
| Awards | IEEE Edison Medal(1967) |
George Harold Brown (14 October 1908 – 11 December 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 theRCA Corporation's efforts to develop acolor 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.
Brown's father, a railway employee, was of Scottish descent, his mother's family was German. He attended high school atPortage, Wisconsin. As a schoolboy he was already experimenting with constructing his own crystal-detector receiver. After graduation he studied electrical engineering at theUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison.
He was still only a college junior when he spent a summer in the Test Department at theGeneral Electric Company inSchenectady, New York. He won two highly competitive graduate fellowships and received aB.S. (1930), anM.S. (1931) and aPh.D. (1933) for his work on broadcast antennas and ground systems.
In 1933 Brown joined RCA atCamden, 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 theturnstile 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 broadcastFM 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 theFederal Communications Commission for broadcasting throughout the US, and it is used throughout the world today.
He moved to the new central research laboratories of the RCA atPrinceton, 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 theWar Department for his contributions.
He and his colleagues developed a method for speeding the production ofpenicillin by means ofradio-frequencyheating techniques. Using inexpensive vacuum pumps and simple condensers it was estimated to be about one-tenth of the cost offreeze drying. Radio-frequency heating also became used in the manufacture of plastic raincoats, bags and other products.
George Brown made pioneering developments indirectional antennas, much of which was published in theProceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers in the mid thirties, and has been republished in several engineering handbooks.
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 theInstitute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and theAmerican Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) before the merger of those two societies into theInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
He was a fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science and of theRoyal Television Society. In 1972 he gave the prestigiousShoenberg Memorial Lecture at theRoyal Institution. He received many awards: theDe Forest Audion Award of theVeteran Wireless Operators Association in 1968, an honorary D.Eng. from theUniversity of Rhode Island in 1968, and the 1967IEEE Edison Medal: "For a meritorious career distinguished by significant engineering contributions toantenna development,electromagnetic propagation, thebroadcastindustry, the art ofradio frequency heating, and color television".
George Brown was a notable personality and powerful communicator and was widely sought as anafter-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 asAlbert Einstein andHermann Weyl.
George Brown married in December 1932. His wife, Elizabeth Ward, was also a graduate student at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison. 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 inPrinceton after a long illness.
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