Color television, transistors, lasers, digital memory, computers, liquid-crystal displays, medical electronics, and digital video-these technologies define modern civilization. David Sarnoff Research Center: RCA Labs to Sarnoff Corporation tells the story of their invention or innovation at this Princeton, New Jersey research facility. The center's engineers, physicists, chemists, technicians, and shop workers developed radar, sonar, and TV-guided missiles during World War II. In 1951, RCA renamed the labs for its visionary leader, David Sarnoff, and the center continued its groundbreaking work for RCA's product divisions and patent-licensing department. General Electric bought RCA in 1986 and donated the David Sarnoff Research Center to SRI International, a nonprofit research institute. Ten years later, the center became Sarnoff Corporation, a company that provides innovative client solutions, licenses patents, starts companies, and sells products. David Sarnoff Research Center: RCA Labs to Sarnoff Corporation celebrates the fascinating process of research and development with stunning photographs selected from thirty thousand stills in RCA's collections now held at the David Sarnoff Library. Masterfully framed and lighted, these rare images reflect American confidence in the promise of technology at its twentieth-century peak and illustrate a sometimes unusual world within a social life of awards, gardens, picnics, and sports teams.

Promotes the David Sarnoff Research Center. The Center, a subsidiary of SRI International, applies its expertise in software and digital IC design, process and materials research, digital signal processing hardware and software, electromechanical devices, and displays to projects for commercial and government clients in the areas of consumer and solid state electronics, materials science, communications, and biomedical technology. The site includes a visitors center, spinoffs, technologies, information and opportunities.

In 1968 a team of scientists and engineers from RCA announced the creation of a new form of electronic display that relied upon an obscure set of materials known as liquid crystals. At a time when televisions utilized bulky cathode ray tubes to produce an image, these researchers demonstrated how liquid crystals could electronically control the passage of light. One day, they predicted, liquid crystal displays would find a home in clocks, calculators—and maybe even a television that could hang on the wall. Half a century later, RCA’s dreams have become a reality, and liquid crystals are the basis of a multibillion-dollar global industry. Yet the company responsible for producing the first LCDs was unable to capitalize upon its invention. In The TVs of Tomorrow, Benjamin Gross explains this contradiction by examining the history of flat-panel display research at RCA from the perspective of the chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, and technicians at the company’s central laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Drawing upon laboratory notebooks, internal reports, and interviews with key participants, Gross reconstructs the development of the LCD and situates it alongside other efforts to create a thin, lightweight replacement for the television picture tube. He shows how RCA researchers mobilized their technical expertise to secure support for their projects. He also highlights the challenges associated with the commercialization of liquid crystals at RCA and Optel—the RCA spin-off that ultimately manufactured the first LCD wristwatch. The TVs of Tomorrow is a detailed portrait of American innovation during the Cold War, which confirms that success in the electronics industry hinges upon input from both the laboratory and the boardroom.

The content of this monograph stems from the writer's early involvement with the design of a series of television camera tubes: the orthicon, the image orthicon and the vidicon. These tubes and their variations, have, at different times been the "eyes" of the television system almost from its inception in 1939. It was natural, during the course of this work, to have a parallel interest in the human visual system as well as in the silver halide photographic process. The problem facing the television system was the same as that facing the human visual and the photographic systems, namely, to abstract the maximum amount of information out of a limited quantity oflight. The human eye and photographic film both repre sented advanced states of development and both surpassed, in their performance, the early efforts on television camera tubes. It was particularly true and "plain to see" that each improvement and refinement of the television camera only served to accentuate the remarkable design of the human eye. A succession of radical advances in camera-tube sensitivity found the eye still operating at levels of illumination too low for the television camera tube. It is only recently that the television camera tube has finally matched and even somewhat exceeded the performance of the human eye at low light levels. It was also clear throughout the work on television camera tubes that the final goal of any visual system-biological, chemical, or electronic-was the ability to detect or count individual photons.

Remarkable advances have been made in recent years in the science and technology of thin film processes for deposition and etching. It is the purpose of this book to bring together tutorial reviews of selected filmdeposition and etching processes from a process viewpoint. Emphasis is placed on the practical use of the processes to provide working guidelines for their implementation, a guide to the literature, and an overview of each process.

Since the first edition of this book was published early in 1970, three major developments have occurred in the field of x-ray spectrochemical analysis. First, wavelength-dispersive spectrometry, in 1970 already securely established among instrumental analytical methods, has matured. Highly sophisticated, miniaturized, modular, solid-state circuitry has replaced elec tron-tube circuitry in the readout system. Computers are now widely used to program and control fully automated spectrometers and to store, process, and compute analytical concentrations directly and immediately from ac cumulated count data. Matrix effects have largely yielded to mathematical treatment. The problems associated with the ultralong-wavelength region have been largely surmounted. Indirect (association) methods have extended the applicability of x-ray spectrometry to the entire periodic table and even to certain classes of compounds. Modern commercial, computerized, auto matic, simultaneous x-ray spectrometers can index up to 60 specimens in turn into the measurement position and for each collect count data for up to 30 elements and read out the analytical results in 1--4 min-all corrected for absorption-enhancement and particle-size or surface-texture effects and wholly unattended. Sample preparation has long been the time-limiting step in x-ray spectrochemical analysis. Second, energy-dispersive spectrometry, in 1970 only beginning to assume its place among instrumental analytical methods, has undergone phenomenal development and application and, some believe, may supplant wavelength spectrometry for most applications in the foreseeable future.

Ever since Newton Minow taught us sophisticates to bemoan the descent of television into a vast wasteland, the dyspeptic chorus of jeremiahs who insist that television news in particular has gone from gold to dross gets noisier and noisier. Charles Ponce de Leon says here, in effect, that this is misleading, if not simply fatuous. He argues in this well-paced, lively, readable book that TV news has changed in response to broader changes in the TV industry and American culture. It is pointless to bewail its decline. "That s the Way It Is "gives us the very first history of American television news, spanning more than six decades, from Camel News Caravan to Countdown with Keith Oberman and The Daily Show. Starting in the latter 1940s, television news featured a succession of broadcasters who became household names, even presences: Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and, with cable expansion, people like Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart, and Bill O Reilly. But behind the scenes, the parallel story is just as interesting, involving executives, producers, and journalists who were responsible for the field s most important innovations. Included with mainstream network news programs is an engaging treatment of news magazines like "60 Minutes" and "20/20, " as well as morning news shows like "Today" and "Good Morning America." Ponce de Leon gives ample attention to the establishment of cable networks (CNN, and the later competitors, Fox News and MSNBC), mixing in colorful anecdotes about the likes of Roger Ailes and Roone Arledge. Frothy features and other kinds of entertainment have been part and parcel of TV news from the start; viewer preferences have always played a role in the evolution of programming, although the disintegration of a national culture since the 1970s means that most of us no longer follow the news as a civic obligation. Throughout, Ponce de Leon places his history in a broader cultural context, emphasizing tensions between the public service mission of TV news and the quest for profitability and broad appeal."

The past decade has seen a major resurgence in optics research and the teaching of optics throughout the major universities both in this country and abroad. Electrooptical devices have become a challenging form of study that has penetrated both the electrical engineering and the physics departments of most major schools. There seems to be something challeng ing about a laser that appeals to both the practical electrical engineer with a hankering for fundamental research and to the fundamental physicist with a hankering to be practical. Somehow or other this same form of enthusiasm has not previously existed in the study of photoelectronic devices that form images. This field of, endeavor is becoming more and more so phisticated as newer forms of solid state devices enter the field not only in the data processing end but in the conversion of radiant energy into electrical charge patterns that are stored, manipulated, and read out in a way that a decade ago would have been considered beyond some fundamental limit or other. It is unfortunate, however, that this kind of material has heretofore been learned only by the process of becoming an apprentice in one or more of the major development laboratories concerned with the manufacture of image intensifiers or television tubes or the production of systems employing these devices.