Akhil Madhani

Engineer,
Inventions in the Field of Robotics

akhil Madhani, who recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical

Engineering at MIT, has invented robotic instruments for use in fields as
diverse as surgery and space exploration.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Engineer and
World Wide Web Inventor
Tim Berners-Lee
For those who want details for some reason. This is more or less a collection of everything which
has been asked for to date.
Background
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976.
Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and
an old television.
He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK
Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays,
and bar code technology.
In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among
other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.
A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980)as
consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva,
Switzerland. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing
information including using random associations. Named "Enquire", and never published, this
program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical
design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and
communications software, and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at
CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system
control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a
heterogeneous remote procedure call system.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on
the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their
knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd",
and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor
which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the
program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet
at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating
feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML
were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.

In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science
(LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide,
with teams at MIT, at INRIA in France, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes
as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and
revolutionary transformations of its usage. The Consortium may be found at http://www.w3.org/.
In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at LCS, and is now a Senior
Research Scientist within the Lab.
Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset,
England and before that a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole,
England.
He is the author of "Weaving the Web", on the the past present and future of the Web.+

Professor Leonard Kleinrock

Engineer and
Inventor of the Internet Technology
Leonard Kleinrock, Professor
UCLA Computer Science Department
Los Angeles, California
Inventor of the Internet Technology
lk@cs.ucla.edu
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is known as the Inventor of the Internet Technology, having created
the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a

graduate student at MIT. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred
when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969.
He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the
transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet. He was listed by the Los
Angeles Times in 1999 as among the `50 People Who Most Influenced Business This
Century'.
Dr. Kleinrock received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963 and has served as a professor of
computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles since then, serving as
chairman of the department from 1991-1995. He received his BEE degree from CCNY in
1957 (also an Honorary Doctor of Science from CCNY in 1997, and an Honorary Doctor of
Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000). He was first President and
Co-founder of Linkabit. He is also Founder and Chairman of Nomadix, Inc., a high-tech
firm located in Southern California. He is also Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard,
an advanced technology forum organization based in Santa Monica, California. He has
published more than 225 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects
including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks,
broadband networks and gigabit networks. Additionally, Dr. Kleinrock has recently
launched the field of nomadic computing, the emerging technology to support users as soon
as they leave their desktop environments; nomadic computing may well be the next major
wave of the Internet.
Dr. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE fellow, an
ACM fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board of the National Research Council. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the
C.C.N.Y. Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the Marconi
Award, the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Okawa Prize,
the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the UCLA Outstanding Teacher Award, the
Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award, the
INFORMS Presidents Award, and the IEEE Harry Goode Award.
He first became interested in electronics while reading a comic book at the age of six. The
centerfold described how to build a crystal radio. He managed to collect the parts, make it
work, and was amazed to hear music from this simple device; thus was an engineer born.
The rest is history.
Wilson Greatbatch
Engineer, Inventor of the
Medical Cardiac Pacemaker.
Founder of Greatbatch Industries

Wilson Greatbatch
Born Sep 6 1919
Medical Cardiac Pacemaker
Implantable Pacemaker
Patent Number(s) 3,057,356
Inducted 1986
Wilson Greatbatch invented the cardiac pacemaker, an innovation selected in 1983 by the
National Society of Professional Engineers as one of the two major engineering
contributions to society during the previous 50 years. Greatbatch has established a series of
companies to manufacture or license his inventions, including Greatbatch Enterprises,
which produces most of the world's pacemaker batteries.
Invention Impact
His original pacemaker patent resulted in the first implantable cardiac pacemaker, which
has led to heart patient survival rates comparable to that of a healthy population of similar
age.
Inventor Bio
Born in Buffalo, New York, Greatbatch received his preliminary education at public
schools in West Seneca, New York. In 1936 he entered military service and served in the
Atlantic and Pacific theaters during World War II. He was honorably discharged with the
rating of aviation chief radioman in 1945. He attended Cornell University and graduated
with a B.E.E. in electrical engineering in 1950. Greatbatch received a master's from the
State University of New York at Buffalo in 1957 and was awarded honorary doctor's
degrees from Houghton College in 1970 and State University of New York at Buffalo in
1984. Although trained as an electrical engineer, Greatbatch has primarily studied
interdisciplinary areas combining engineering with medical electronics, agricultural
genetics, the electrochemistry of pacemaker batteries, and the electrochemical polarization
of physiological electrodes.

More
Making Hearts Beat
by John Adam Some people seemed destined for success. Maybe they are always at the top
of their class. Maybe they are from wealthy or from well-connected families. Or perhaps
they work superhuman hours. Wilson Greatbatch, the 1996 honoree of the Lemelson-MIT
Lifetime Achievement Award, fits none of those criteria.
This is the story of how a very average person developed into one of the country's greatest
inventors with more than 140 patents. His most famous invention, called the cardiac
pacemaker, keeps the rhythm of millions of heartbeats and helps people live longer and
better. The pacemaker was the first electronic device ever surgically implanted inside
human bodies. In October 1996, Greatbatch shared his experiences with middle school
students in one of the Lemelson Center's Innovative Lives programs.
When he was five Wilson Greatbatch picked up a harmonica and began to make screeching
noises. He stuck with it. No one taught him, yet eventually melodies started to flow like a
songbird's. He did not realize then that he learned the greatest lesson of his life: don't fear
mistakes, learn by them. Music always fascinated Greatbatch. He grew up in the 1920s,
when "wireless" radio amazed people. These invisible waves silently carried music and
voices through fog, through cement, and into people's homes. Receivers captured these
signals and made sense of them, reconstituting the sounds.
"I think it was the mystery of it that attracted me" to radio electronics. "Something was
happening that you couldn't see or feel," he recalled. An only child, in his teens he found he
could expand his world with radio. In his early teens he built his own short wave radio
receiver. Cockney accents from London, England proved he was reaching far away. He
wanted to talk back. Around 16, Greatbatch passed the test for an amateur radio license
and joined the Sea Scouts (a type of Boy Scouts) because they had a radio station.
World War II changed everything. Radio was no longer just fun. It became critical to war
communications between ships and airplanes. Greatbatch, packing his trusty harmonica,
joined the Navy. He repaired electronics on a destroyer, served as radioman on convoys to
Iceland, and crewed aboard the USS Monterrey aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Greatbatch
tuned the aircraft's electronics and ensured they were reliable. If an aircraft's radar and
communications failed, the plane might be lost at sea. He also flew combat missions. In six
months of combat, a third of the squadron crew perished. Amid all that seemingly random
death, Greatbatch became religious and began carrying a Bible in his pants leg for each
mission.
Asked if he himself killed people, he simply replies, "Probably. During bombing runs I just
held down the machine gun trigger." When the war ended, Greatbatch returned to Buffalo
with his new bride and longtime girlfriend Eleanor, a home economics teacher. He thought
about teaching industrial arts. He worked a year as a telephone repairman. Then he
enrolled at Cornell University. Under the G.I. Bill, the government paid for part of his
expenses in appreciation for his military service. "After all that time in the dive-bombers
with the ack-ack [anti-aircraft fire] bursting all around, you appreciate the change," he

said. "I was so grateful. I have repeatedly and vainly tried to imbue my children with the
kind of appreciation that I had, just for the opportunity to sit, and hear, and learn," he
said. "I don't think I ever got this across to them."
At Cornell, he took math, physics, and chemistry. He tested poorly -- maybe because so
many jobs kept him busy. To support his family, he maintained the local radio station. He
also built receivers for what became the Cornell radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Eventually Greatbatch joined the Psychology Department's animal behavior farm. He
attached instruments to about 100 sheep and goats to monitor blood pressure, heart rate,
and brain waves in science experiments.
During 1951 on this animal farm, Greatbatch shared brown bag lunches with two surgeons
visiting from New England. They described an ailment called heart block that occurs when
natural electrical impulses from the heart's upper chambers (atria) fail to reach the heart's
lower chambers or ventricles. The result is irregular heartbeats that can cause shortness of
breath and, in extreme cases, loss of consciousness and even death.
"When they described it, I knew I could fix it," Greatbatch recalled. It was basically a
problem of communications. To put it in radio terms, the signal was not getting through.
Unknown to Greatbatch, Paul Zoll in Boston had made the first practical external
pacemaker in 1952. About the size of a table radio, it could be plugged into household
current. Its repeated electrical shocks were painful and damaged the skin, but the device
could save lives. Several years later, Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic Inc., developed
a hand-held external pacemaker that was powered by batteries.
In the meantime, Greatbatch had returned to Buffalo to teach as an assistant professor of
electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo while he earned his master's degree. He
also worked for the nearby Chronic Disease Research Institute. By that time, around 1956,
commercial silicon transistors had become available for US $90 each, and Greatbatch,
working for a doctor at the institute, was designing a circuit to help record fast heart
sounds.
By mistake, he grabbed the wrong resistor from a box and plugged it into the circuit he was
making. The curcuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for 1 second and then
repeated. Greatbatch recognized the lub-dub rhythm.
"I stared at the thing in disbelief," he said. This was exactly what was needed to drive a
sick human heart! For the next five years, most of the world's pacemakers used that simple
blocking oscillator design -- just because of Greatbatch's accident.
Greatbatch met William C. Chardack, chief of surgery at Buffalo's Veterans
Administration Hospital. Chardack predicted such an implantable pacemaker would save
10,000 lives a year.
Three weeks later, on May 7, 1958, Greatbatch brought what would become the world's
first implantable cardiac pacemaker, made with two Texas Instrument transistors, to

Chardack's hospital. There Chardack and another surgeon, Andrew Gage, exposed the
heart of a dog, to which Greatbatch touched the two pacemaker wires. The device took
control of the heartbeat. The team stared in near disbelief.
"I seriously doubt if anything I ever do will ever give me the elation I felt that day when my
own two cubic inch piece of electronic design controlled a living heart," Greatbatch
scribbled in his lab diary in 1959. "We were pretty naive about early pacemaker designs,"
Greatbatch recalled. "We thought that wrapping the module in electric tape would seal it."
But body fluid found its way through any holes to short out the circuit. That first implant
lasted only 4 hours. Switching tactics, they began to cast the unit in a solid block of epoxy.
Within a year, devices could last four months. It was time now, they felt, to look for a
suitable human patient. Greatbatch's then employer, Taber Instrument Corp., was
unwilling to risk a million-dollar company on a perilous item like the pacemaker, so
Greatbatch left. He got into a race.
Like so many other inventions, an implantable pacemaker was the goal of several groups
during the late 1950s-from General Electric Co. to Swedish researchers. In Sweden, Ake
Senning had attempted the first human implant late in 1958. The unit failed after 3 hours.
A second unit worked for eight days before failing, and the patient had to wait for three
years before receiving a satisfactory unit.
Perhaps Greatbatch succeeded because of his deadline: he'd saved $2000 and enough extra
so he could devote himself full-time to the pacemaker. He figured the savings could feed his
wife and four kids for two years. (His wife is very resourceful and he raised a big garden.)
"I put it to the Lord in prayer and felt led to quit all my jobs," Greatbatch said. He
retreated to his backyard workshop, a barn heated by a wood-burning stove. There he
made 50 pacemakers by hand that would launch Medtronics, the biggest medical device
company in the world. Forty of his units would go into animals.
Just like harmonica-playing as a boy, Greatbatch, now in his late thirties, learned along the
way. Improvements were made at each step. He tried different materials. He experimented
with designs with three, six, eight and ten batteries.
At the same time, he was developing reliability procedures. As in World War II airplane
maintenance, lives critically depended on his electronic professionalism. In his bedroom, he
set up two ovens to bake transistors in a temperature test. His wife, Eleanor, administered
shock tests. "Many mornings," he said, "I would awake to the cadence of Eleanor 'tap, tap,
tapping' the transistors" with a pencil. Only the best transistors made it through these
tortuous hurdles.
During 1960, starting on April 15, Chardack and his associates implanted pacemakers in 10
patients, most over 60 years of age. Two were children. All had complete heart blocks, so
that without pacemakers they had perhaps a 50-percent chance of living more than a year.
The first patient lived 18 months. Another of the initial group was a young man who had

collapsed on his job at a local rubber factory . After receiving a pacemaker, he retrained as
a hairdresser and lived for 30 years.
Administering tiny painless shocks like clockwork, the pacemaker controlled the heart beat
from within the body. It allowed a normal rate of invigorating fresh blood to circulate from
the scalp to the tips of the toes. Patients with bad hearts could now shower and swim
without worry. One of Greatbatch's most gratifying moments came from watching
grandparents interact with grandchildren. "With the pacemaker," Greatbatch said,
"grandpa could be in the mainstream again."
Greatbatch admits that "if I didn't do it [invent the implantable pacemaker], someone else
would have. Most new developments are like that -- not somebody getting a Eureka flash."
What distinguishes Greatbatch perhaps is a persistant committment to improving his
invention.
Greatbatch kept learning from mistakes. Soon the biggest problem became the battery.
Patients had to undergo surgery every two years just to change batteries. Greatbatch
devised a special lithium battery that now often lasts 10 years or more. He created a
company to make the special batteries. They now power most of the world's estimated 3
million pacemaker patients.
Most of the millions that Greatbatch has earned he has plowed back into research or
donated to education and charities. He lives very simply near a dairy farm outside Buffalo
where he was born. One would never guess by his manner that he is a great inventor. "He's
just a learner," said his wife Eleanor. "If something is new, it doesn't bother him a bit."
For the last decade Greatbatch has been investigating the human immunodeficiency virus
of AIDS. With John Sanford of Cornell Universitiy, he was able to inhibit a similar viral
replication in cats. The two were recently awarded U.S. Patent 5 324 643 for this work. To
help his studies, he recently bought a new computer and modem to access the Internet from
his home.
He also enjoys talking to students. Invariably, he repeats passages from his favorite twominute speech, first given in 1987 at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y. He urges
listeners, "Don't fear failure. Don't crave success. The reward is not in the results, but
rather in the doing."
If the crowd is especially lucky, this persistent inventor might even take out his trusty
harmonica and play.

Dr. Martin Cooper

Engineer, and Inventor of the Mobile Phone

Martin Cooper - Inventor Of The Cellphone

Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is
considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a
portable cell phone in April 1973. The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell
Labs head of research.
AT&T's research arm, Bell Laboratories, introduced the idea of cellular communications in
1947. But Motorola and Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies were in a race to
incorporate the technology into portable devices.
Cooper, now 70, wanted people to be able to carry their phones with them anywhere.
While he was a project manager at Motorola in 1973, Cooper set up a base station in New
York with the first working prototype of a cellular telephone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac. After
some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone
technology to New York to show the public.
The First Cellphone (1973)
Name: Motorola Dyna-Tac
Size: 9 x 5 x 1.75 inches
Weight: 2.5 pounds
Display: None
Number of Circuit Boards: 30
Talk time: 35 minutes
Recharge Time: 10 hours
Features: Talk, listen, dial
In 1973, when the company installed the base station to handle the first public
demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, Motorola was trying to persuade
the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies
for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in
Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New
York to show the public.

On April 3, 1973, standing on a street near the Manhattan Hilton, Mr. Cooper decided to
attempt a private call before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. He picked up
the 2-pound Motorola handset called the Dyna-Tac and pushed the "off hook" button.
The phone came alive, connecting Mr. Cooper with the base station on the roof of the
Burlington Consolidated Tower (now the Alliance Capital Building) and into the land-line
system. To the bewilderment of some passers-by, he dialed the number and held the phone
to his ear.
Who is he?
Cooper grew up in Chicago and earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois
Institute of Technology. After four years in the navy serving on destroyers and a
submarine, he worked for a year at a telecommunications company.
Hired by Motorola in 1954, Mr. Cooper worked on developing portable products, including
the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967.
He then led Motorola's cellular research.
WWiLAN's WOFDM Technology Incorporated into WirelessMAN
Wi-LAN announced that the WirelessMAN Standard 802.16a, incorporates Wi-LAN's
patented W-OFDM (Wide-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) technology.
Wi-LAN has a non-exclusive agreement with Fujitsu Microelectronics America (FMA) to
develop Standard 802.16a System-on-Chip solutions.
Motorola Introduces Worlds First Java Linux Handset, A760
The Motorola A760 is the worlds first handset combining a Linux Operating System (OS)
and Java Technology, with full multimedia PDA functionality.
Worlds Smallest GSM/GPRS Chipset Launched
Skyworks has unveiled the world's first complete handset radio system that fits into a
single, dime-sized package. It saves handset designers significant space, cost and designcycle time while providing a roadmap for quad-band and 3G handsets in the future.
Top

Nolan Bushnell
Engineer, and Inventor of Video Games.
Founder of Atari Corp., and uWink

Nolan Bushnell, CEO and founder uWink.com, Inc. is best known for bringing "PONG,"
Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater to the masses, and is
justifiably revered as the "Father of the Video Game Industry."
NOLAN BUSHNELL BIO Nolan Bushnell, CEO and founder uWink.com, Inc. is best
known for bringing "PONG," Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater
to the masses, and is justifiably revered as the "Father of the Video Game Industry."
Over the past 20 years, Bushnell has built upon his flair for business and innovation,
founding over 20 companies, including Catalyst Technologies, Etak, Androbot, Axlon,
Irata, AAPPS and ByVideo. Additionally, he has provided consulting services to numerous
corporations, including Commodore International, IBM, Cisco Systems and US Digital
Communications. He also sits on the Board of Directors of several leading companies
including WAVE Systems and most recently has become a contributor to the
MetaMarkets.com online "Think Tank."
With his current venture, uWink.com, Bushnell and his team intend to make significant
inroads into changing the face of Internet entertainment by streaming it into public venues
and establishing mass multi-player gaming tournaments worldwide.
Bushnell received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah where he is
a "Distinguished Fellow," and also attended Stanford University Graduate School. With a
passion for enhancing and improving the educational process and a desire to motivate
others, Bushnell frequently lectures at major universities and corporations throughout the
United States, inspiring others with his views on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Over the years, Bushnell has received numerous awards of distinction, including being
named ASI's "Man of the Year" in 1997, as well as being inducted into the "Video Game
Hall of Fame." In January 2000, Bushnell became one of the first 50 inductees into the
Consumer Electronics Association "Hall of Fame," recognizing his significant contributions
to the 20th Century. Bushnell is also featured as one of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial
icons in, "The Revolutionaries," a historical view of Silicon Valley, which is part of the
renowned Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.
Bushnell was granted patents on some of the basic technologies for many of the early video
games developed and is also the inventor or co-inventor of numerous worldwide patents in
various other fields and industries.

Visit Nolan Bushnell's uWink.com to learn more about his current ventures.

Godfrey Hounsfield
Engineer, and
Inventor of the CT Scan ( Computed Tomography )
Nobel Prize Winner 1972
Godfrey N. Hounsfield Autobiography
I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the
freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the first world war, my father had bought a
small farm, which became a marvellous playground for his five children. My two brothers and
two sisters were all older than I and, as they naturally pursued their own more adult interests,
this gave me the advantage of not being expected to join in, so I could go off and follow my
own inclinations.
The farm offered an infinite variety of ways to do this. At a very early age I became intrigued
by all the mechanical and electrical gadgets which even then could be found on a farm; the
threshing machines, the binders, the generators. But the period between my eleventh and
eighteenth years remains the most vivid in my memory because this was the time of my first
attempts at experimentation, which might never have been made had I lived in a city. In a
village there are few distractions and no pressures to join in at a ball game or go to the
cinema, and I was free to follow the trail of any interesting idea that came my way. I
constructed electrical recording machines; I made hazardous investigations of the principles
of flight, launching myself from the tops of haystacks with a home-made glider; I almost blew
myself up during exciting experiments using water-filled tar barrels and acetylene to see how
high they could be waterjet propelled. It may now be a trick of the memory but I am sure that
on one occasion I managed to get one to an altitude of 1000 feet!

During this time I was learning the hard way many fundamentals in reasoning. This was all
at the expense of my schooling at Magnus Grammar School in Newark, where they tried hard
to educate me but where I responded only to physics and mathematics with any ease and
moderate enthusiasm.
Aeroplanes interested me and at the outbreak of the second world war I joined the RAF as a
volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made
available for Radio Mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in Radio. After
sitting a trade test I was immediately taken on as a Radar Mechanic Instructor and moved to
the then RAF-occupied Royal College of Science in South Kensington and later to Cranwell
Radar School. At Cranwell, in my spare time, I sat and passed the City and Guilds
examination in Radio Communications. While there I also occupied myself in building largescreen oscilloscope and demonstration equipment as aids to instruction, for which I was
awarded the Certificate of Merit.
It was very fortunate for me that, during this time, my work was appreciated by Air ViceMarshal Cassidy. He was responsible for my obtaining a grant after the war which enabled
me to attend Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London, where I received a
diploma.
I joined the staff of EMI in Middlesex in 1951, where I worked for a while on radar and
guided weapons and later ran a small design laboratory. During this time I became
particularly interested in computers, which were then in their infancy. It was interesting,
pioneering work at that time: drums and tape decks had to be designed from scratch. The core
store was a relatively new idea which was the subject of considerable experiment. The stores
had to be designed and then plain-threaded by hand (causing a few frightful tangles on
occasions). Starting in about 1958 I led a design team building the first all-transistor
computer to be constructed in Britain, the EMIDEC 1100. In those days the transistor, the
OC72, was a relatively slow device, much slower than valves which were then used in most
computers. However, I was able to overcome this problem by driving the transistor with a
magnetic core. This increased the speed of the machine so that it compared with that of valve
computers and brought about the use of transistors in computing earlier than had been
anticipated. Twenty-four large installations were sold before increases in the speed of
transistors rendered this method obsolete.
When this work finished I transferred to EMI Central Research Laboratories, also at Hayes.
My first project there was hardly covered in glory: I set out to design a one-million word
immediate access thin-film computer store. The problem was that after a time it was evident
that this would not be commercially viable. The project was therefore abandoned and, rather
than being immediately assigned to another task I was given the opportunity to go away
quietly and think of other areas of research which I thought might be fruitful. One of the
suggestions I put forward was connected with automatic pattern recognition and it was while
exploring various aspects of pattern recognition and their potential, in 1967, that the idea
occurred to me which was eventually to become the EMI-Scanner and the technique of
computed tomography.

The steps in my work between this initial idea and its realisation in the first clinical brainscanner have already been well documented. As might be expected, the programme involved
many frustrations, occasional awareness of achievement when particular technical hurdles
were overcome, and some amusing incidents, not least the experiences of travelling across
London by public transport carrying bullock's brains for use in evaluation of an experimental
scanner rig in the Laboratories.
After the initial experimental work, the designing and building of four original clinical
prototypes and the development of five progressively more sophisticated prototypes of brain
and whole body scanner (three of which went into production) kept me fully occupied until
1976. Since then I have been able to broaden my interest in a number of projects which are
currently in hand in the Laboratories, including further possible advances in CT technology
and in related fields of diagnostic imaging, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.
As a bachelor, I have been able to devote a great deal of time to my general interest in science
which more recently has included physics and biology. A great deal of my adult life has
centred on my work, and only recently did I bother to establish a permanent residence. Apart
from my work, my greatest pleasures have been mainly out-of-doors, and although I no longer
ski I greatly enjoy walking in the mountains and leading country rambles. I am fond of music,
whether light or classical, and play the piano in a self-taught way. In company I enjoy lively
way-out discussions.
Top
Nolan Bushnell
Engineer, and Inventor of Video Games.
Founder of Atari Corp., and uWink

Nolan Bushnell, CEO and founder uWink.com, Inc. is best known for bringing
"PONG," Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater to the
masses, and is justifiably revered as the "Father of the Video Game Industry."
NOLAN BUSHNELL BIO Nolan Bushnell, CEO and founder uWink.com, Inc. is
best known for bringing "PONG," Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza
Time Theater to the masses, and is justifiably revered as the "Father of the Video
Game Industry."
Over the past 20 years, Bushnell has built upon his flair for business and innovation,
founding over 20 companies, including Catalyst Technologies, Etak, Androbot,
Axlon, Irata, AAPPS and ByVideo. Additionally, he has provided consulting services
to numerous corporations, including Commodore International, IBM, Cisco
Systems and US Digital Communications. He also sits on the Board of Directors of

several leading companies including WAVE Systems and most recently has become a
contributor to the MetaMarkets.com online "Think Tank."
With his current venture, uWink.com, Bushnell and his team intend to make
significant inroads into changing the face of Internet entertainment by streaming it
into public venues and establishing mass multi-player gaming tournaments
worldwide.
Bushnell received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah
where he is a "Distinguished Fellow," and also attended Stanford University
Graduate School. With a passion for enhancing and improving the educational
process and a desire to motivate others, Bushnell frequently lectures at major
universities and corporations throughout the United States, inspiring others with his
views on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Over the years, Bushnell has received numerous awards of distinction, including
being named ASI's "Man of the Year" in 1997, as well as being inducted into the
"Video Game Hall of Fame." In January 2000, Bushnell became one of the first 50
inductees into the Consumer Electronics Association "Hall of Fame," recognizing
his significant contributions to the 20th Century. Bushnell is also featured as one of
Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial icons in, "The Revolutionaries," a historical view of
Silicon Valley, which is part of the renowned Tech Museum of Innovation in San
Jose, California.
Bushnell was granted patents on some of the basic technologies for many of the
early video games developed and is also the inventor or co-inventor of numerous
worldwide patents in various other fields and industries.
Visit Nolan Bushnell's uWink.com to learn more about his current ventures.

Mark Champkins
Engineer, Inventor of
'New Self-heating Crockery'

Self-Heating Crockery

45million is spent on hospital food that ends

up in the dustbin, one of the prime reasons
for spoilage is that the food is cold before the

patients have a chance to eat it. I have

designed a range of crockery that will instantaneously
heat to fifty degrees when
triggered, and significantly reduce the rate
of cooling of foodstuffs and liquids.
Mr Mark Champkins
T: 07764 212453