James T. Russell

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James Torrance Russell (born February 23, 1931 in Bremerton (Washington) ) is an American physicist and inventor (forerunner of compact disc technology).

Russell studied physics at Reed College with a bachelor's degree in 1953. He then worked for General Electric physicists at the Hanford Site (with laboratories in Richland, Washington ). In 1960 he became a senior physicist there. From 1965 he was at the newly opened Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Battelle Institute in Richland (originally Battelle was in Columbus (Ohio) ).

At General Electric he developed apparatus for experiments and among other things the first welding machine with electron beams and he was one of the first to set up a television screen and a keyboard as the only interface for computers. At the Battelle Institute, he developed the concept of digital optical data storage and playback for sound recordings with first patents in 1966 and 1969. Writing and reading was done with a laser and the recording was made digitally via a photosensitive plate. He was granted a patent in 1970 (he had a total of 26 patents on CD technology by 1985). Prototypes of it were ready for operation from 1973 and were presented by him to many companies (such as Sony and Philips ) and descriptions were sent out. His recording media, however, were the size of an old record, even if Russell kept working on it. At the end of the 1960s, Philipps also dealt with the idea of ​​optical recordings ( Klaas Compaan ), but initially for video (with laser vision in 1975, which was a flop). In the 1970s, the development of the CD in competition (but also exchange) between Sony and Philipps was advanced with the first demonstrations in 1979. However, the development took place independently of Russell's pioneering work, even if, for example, Sony acquired licenses from him. He stayed with Batelle until 1980.

Russell founded his own company (Russell Assoc. Inc.), in which he further developed his patents and developed others for industrial optical systems (barcode scanners, among others). He also developed a high-speed optical recording and reproducing apparatus with no moving parts. He had other patents on an optical RAM .

From 1980 to 1985 he was Vice President and Technical Director of Digital Recordings Corporation and 1991 to 1995 of Ioptics Inc. He lives in Bellevue, Washington .

He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

There were also other early inventors of early CD technology, such as David Paul Gregg (1923-2001), who in the late 1950s at Westrex (part of Western Electric ) in California developed a video disc with electron beam recording and patented it in 1962. He developed his ideas of optical recording and playback at 3M and in his own company (Gauss Electrophysics) (including a camera for the system) and his patents were acquired by MCA in 1968 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career dates in American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Biography in Inventor of the Week, MIT, see web links
  3. ↑ Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, The CD Story, Journal of the AES, Volume 46, 1998, pp. 458-465, pdf . Russell is not mentioned there, but he also mainly deals with developments from the 1970s and describes everything before 1969 as prehistory .
  4. ^ Gregg's entry in Smart Computing Encyclopedia
personal data
SURNAME Russell, James T.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Russell, James Torrance (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremerton (Washington)