By Richard Comerford, rcomerford@hearst.com
Most people would recognizes the names Thomas Edison, or Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs and be able to tell you what contributions they made to technology. But if you mentioned the names Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval, or Karl Ferdinand Braun, or Howard Vollum, you’d probably get a blank stare. The first three men are well known because they invented things that people come into contact with every day. But that latter gentlemen invented things that most people have not heard of: the galvanometer, the oscilloscope, and the oscilloscope trigger.
The irony is that the first three could never have succeeded without the work of the second three. All of the technologies we have today owe their existence to the people who created instruments with which to measure and test those technologies. Yet even today, the people who are inventing new and more advanced measurement instruments work largely in obscurity.
You have to ask yourself why these individuals would choose to work in the test and measurement field, passing up the potential glory of working in, say, consumer electronics. Anyone who has ever spent time with them will tell you they are some of the brightest people around; they can make technology work beyond what it is generally thought to be capable of. They can be presented with the most advanced, smallest, and fastest devices — ones that will not become commercially available until sometime in the future — and find a way to measure them accurately today, with the current technology.
I suppose you could say they’re crazy to pass up potential fame, but the T&M people I’ve met are completely rational. What they really love is the challenge of being able to solve complex problems with any resources they can bring to bear. It’s sort of an engineering tour de force, showing that you can devise a way to make a measurement accurately and reliably that many of your peers would not be able to.
In this issue we celebrate test and measurement, and those whose work appears here represent an elite group who can tackle the most difficult challenges that technology can throw at them. It may not bring fame and fortune, but it is surely a labor of love.
3 Comments
I would appreciate some follow-up on the T&M pioneers from the mid-50s. TEK did great for scopes. Wavetek gave us the function generator, WESTON (or was it Systron Donner) who gave us the dual slope integrating digital voltmeter. What about Cimron, NLS and a host of others. An interesting topic … What happened to General Radio, Leeds & Northup, Wavetek and others?
Thank you Richard for bringing these innovators to our attention. Without them we would still be doing such things as touching our hands to a key tied to a wire on a kite to determine if there is electricity in a cloud instead of using sophisticated measuring instruments to determine the exact electrical energy in a particular cloud without exposing the tester to hazardous and possibly deadly amounts of energy flowing through their body. Thank you, all of you out there who ponder the possibilities and create new ways of measuring the stuff in the world around us.
Hi Ron! The history of instrumentation is a fascinating study to me, and one that can take up a considerable amount of time, considering the need to do a lot of digging into some pretty arcane places. If I ever retire, I hope to be able to pursue it full time.
To answer a couple of your questions, the dual-slope integrating voltmeter was invented by Rosewell Gilbert of Weston in the late 1950s, but it was impractical to implement in the then-current tube technology, and Weston was sold before it was possible to use ICs to realize the design. How this design moved to Systron-Donner I can’t say, but the foremost expert on this topic, I believe, would be Eiju Matsumoto of the Society of Historical Metrology in Japan.
General Radio, which invented the first push-button signal generator among other things, moved strongly into the automated test equipment business in the second half of the 20th century and was known as GenRad before it was absorbed into Teradyne in 2001. However, the orginal General Radio measurement instrument line lives on at IET Labs, which in the early 2000′s acquired the GenRad standards, impedance decades, megohmmeters, digibridges, audio and strobe lines and now continues to manufacture, service and support these product lines.
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