Harry Stockman

Harry Edmond Sigfrid Stockman (born August 24, 1905 in Stockholm , † May 18, 1991 in Dennis (Massachusetts) ) was a Swedish radio engineer and inventor who laid one of the foundations of RFID .

After graduating from the Stockholm Tekniska Institute with a degree in electrical engineering (1926), he first worked for AEG and Ericsson , before becoming editor of the specialist magazine “Radio” in 1929. In the same year he visited Manfred von Ardenne in Berlin. In the mid-thirties he became an assistant to Prof. Erik Løfgren at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan in Stockholm.

In March 1940 Stockman emigrated to the United States and a year later became a PhD student at EL Chaffee at Harvard University . After the USA entered the war, like all employees of the physics faculty, he trained military personnel in the physical basics of the new radio technologies, especially in radar . In 1946 he received his doctorate with a thesis on frequency conversion .

Shortly before, he was appointed head of communications technology at the newly established Cambridge Field Station of the US Army Air Forces . In 1947 he began his experiments here on "Reflected Power Communication", a method in which communication takes place via reflected carrier waves. One of the applications he devised, the “Number Identification System” that he called, is a rudimentary form of a passive backscatter RFID system.

Stockman presented his results at the National Convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in March 1948, as well as in a contribution to the "Proceedings of the IRE". Interest was muted, however.

In August 1948, Stockman left Cambridge Field Station due to internal disputes and after various positions in the electronics industry, he became a professor at Merrimack College and the Lowell Technological Institute in the late 1950s. In addition, he ran a small company, the "Stockman Electronics Research Company Laboratory", which specialized in the construction of models and apparatus for physics laboratories and classrooms and devoted itself to general inventions in the field of electronics and electrical engineering.

After his retirement, Stockman moved with his wife Helen to Dennis on Cape Cod, where he died in 1991.

Works

• Modern Televisionsteknik , 1940
• A Study of Frequency Conversion and the Frequency Conversion Diagram Method , Diss., Harvard 1946
• Communication by Means of Reflected Power , in Proceedings of the IRE , Vol. 36 (1948), 10, 1196-1204
• Time-Saving Network Calculations , 1956
• Transistor and Diode Network Problems and Solutions , 1967
• Scientific Models for Experiments; with an Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism , 1976
• Transient Analysis aided by Network Theorems , 1983

literature

• Christoph Rosol: RFID. From the origin of an (all) present cultural technology. Kadmos, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-86599-041-9