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Inventor, lithium-ion battery anode
Home Furnishings Daily
Father of the Microprocessor
Chief Director of Liquid Crystal Display Development
President and CEO
Eastman Kodak
Co-inventor OLED
Magnolia Audio Video
Magnolia Audio Video
Eastman Kodak
Co-inventor of OLED
President and CEO
Satellite Radio Pioneer and Innovator; co-founder Sirius XM Radio
Already a satellite communications legend, Robert Briskman should have been contemplating retirement as he approached his 60th birthday in 1990. Instead, Briskman co-founded Satellite CD Radio – now Sirius XM – developing and implementing the first major advancement in radio since Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, and revitalizing the radio industry.
Born in New York City on Oct. 15, 1932, Briskman earned his B.S. in engineering from Princeton University in 1954, and his master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1961. As chief of program support for NASA's Office of Tracking and Data Acquisition from 1959 to 1963, he invented the unified S-band microwave communications system still used by the International Space Station, receiving NASA's Apollo Achievement Award for his work.
After leaving NASA, Briskman worked for the Communications Satellite Corporation and then COMSAT General Corporation, holding a variety of positions. During his time at COMSAT, Briskman was responsible for, or was involved in, a long list of satellite communication firsts, including satellite command and control for the launch of INTELSAT I (the first commercial communications satellite), the development and implementation of the INTELSAT global communications system, the COMSTAR satellite system, and the first TDMA system used for voice and data communications services for IBM. Briskman was also responsible for planning domestic communications services via satellites, including AT&T's satellite system.
He then served as senior vice president of engineering for Geostar from 1986 to 1990, where he was responsible for the development, design, implementation and operation of the company's Radio Determination Satellite Service (RDSS), which enabled positioning and message communications between mobile users and dispatch centers.
In 1990, former Geostar president Martin Rothblatt founded MARCOR, an incubator company, and asked Briskman to come aboard to assist in several of the proposed development ventures. One of these incubator companies, Satellite CD Radio, was established to discover if the idea of satellite radio was feasible. Briskman thought it was.
Briskman transformed his satellite radio theories into patented developments on satellite spatial and time diversity, which enables mobile users to receive satellite audio transmissions with almost no outages. He implemented the entire satellite radio technology infrastructure – the satellites, earth stations, terrestrial repeaters and consumer receivers – to make satellite radio practical. His efforts included a new digital broadcast technology called SDARS (Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service), which broadcasts digital audio from satellites in the 2332 MHz band.
Briskman designed and directed the construction of three of the then most powerful commercial broadcast satellites, each producing two megawatts of radiated power, and launched them into a "figure 8" geosynchronous orbit over the Americas in 2000. The unique elliptical orbit that Briskman devised achieves the highest possible elevation angle of the satellites to the three-channel mobile receivers he designed. As a result, Sirius XM radios can almost always capture the signal, even in urban centers.
Briskman designed and built the earth stations and satellite control facility technologies to complete the Sirius system. On the business side, he helped procure the radio frequency allocations from the FCC, finalized in 1993, and aided CD Radio CEO, David Margolese in raising the needed $1.4 billion to launch the service. In 1999, the company was renamed Sirius Satellite Radio.
Sirius started broadcasting on July 1, 2002. Briskman's technology was then licensed to competitor XM, which merged with Sirius in 2008. Today, Sirius XM subscribers can receive more than 160 audio channels, including 65 commercial-free music channels and 95 voice channels featuring sports, news, entertainment, traffic, commentary, weather and other topics.
Satellite radio now has more than 23 million U.S. subscribers and another two million in Canada, with more than 50 million estimated listeners.
After retiring from the board of directors and other executive positions, Briskman assumed the title of technical executive to concentrate on finishing and improving the technical implementation of the Sirius XM system. He has successfully launched a record 31 consecutive satellites; a 32nd is due to launch in 2013.
Briskman has been honored by a multitude of satellite, science and engineering organizations including the AIAA (The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), the Washington Academy of Sciences, the IEEE, the SSPI (Society of Satellite Professionals International) and the Space Foundation.
Digital Television Pioneer
For 70-plus years, there was only one method used to broadcast over-the-air television, an analog method prone to interference from nearly anything and everything inside and out, including simply walking by a TV antenna. Persnickety TV reception has all but disappeared with digital television thanks to an interference-free digital transmission system called VSB (Vestigial Side Band) invented by former Zenith researcher Richard W. Citta.
Instead of toiling over schematics, test equipment and equations in a lab, Citta discovered the solutions to the digital broadcasting problem while lying flat on his back in a hospital bed.
Citta was born on July 17, 1944. Like many teens in the 1950s, Citta and his friends were ham radio operators, building their sets from kits sold at local electronics stores. In high school, Citta tinkered with cars and fixed all the teachers' TVs. He worked on electronics sets others had bought and were unable to complete, and discovered he could.
He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1968 and his master's in the same subject from the University of Washington in 1971. During his first 20 years at Zenith, Citta's work included developing unique modulation technologies for cable set-top boxes and two way interactive cable TV systems.
Citta's initial work on VSB began in 1987, when he and his group at Zenith embarked on new modulation technologies for cable transmission and terrestrial broadcasting. In the spring of 1988, Citta – nicknamed "Wolfman" thanks to his thick and wild salt-and-pepper hair and beard – was perched precariously atop a ladder while painting his house. The ladder gave way and Citta fell, crushing his left ankle.
With little else to occupy him while lying immobile in a hospital bed, Citta stared at the ceiling pondering the HDTV transmission problem – and experienced a "Eureka!" moment. He jotted down some notes and drew diagrams for what would become the new VSB digital TV transmission scheme and presented his concept to Zenith higher-ups when back on the job a few weeks later.
VSB modulation employs unique technology to prevent interference into existing NTSC (analog) broadcast signals. It contains a unique pilot signal to aid in reception under extremely adverse receiving conditions resulting from white noise, impulse noise and multipath impairments.
Citta's breakthrough enabled the use of the previously unusable or "taboo" channels in the VHF and UHF television broadcast spectrum. VSB was first proposed as an HDTV transmission method in Zenith's 1988 proposal to the FCC's Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS). Based on the success of these demos, Citta and the Zenith team developed the so-called 8-VSB transmission system, employed by the HDTV Grand Alliance, which was formed in May 1993.
Citta led exhaustive testing under both laboratory and real-world conditions. The Grand Alliance standard was finalized in September 1995 after several successful transmission field tests in Charlotte, N.C. In December 1996, VSB was officially adopted by the FCC as the centerpiece of the nation's new digital television broadcast standard. In January 2001, the FCC reaffirmed 8-VSB once, for all and forever.
Citta led many of the technological innovation efforts that facilitated the end of analog TV broadcasting and its complete replacement by the digital VSB technology. These efforts laid the foundation for the FCC's simulcast rules during the transition from analog to all-digital broadcasting between 1996 and June 2009.
Today, more than 1,800 U.S. television broadcasters are broadcasting digitally using VSB. Hundreds of millions of digital TV sets have been sold in the U.S. market alone, all of which must contain VSB demodulators.
After retiring from Zenith in 2000, Citta was named chief scientist for LINX Electronics designing digital TV receivers. He spent three years as chief scientist for chip maker Micronas developing custom integrated circuits and chips for use in HDTVs, and two years as a consultant with Thomson before founding his own consulting firm, the R. Citta Group, which develops concepts for enhancing the mobile ATSC DTV ecosystem.
Citta, has been awarded roughly 200 patents, with many still pending. He is a charter member of the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers and, along with other Zenith colleagues, received the prestigious IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 2006 for development of the VSB transmission system. In 1997, Citta and the Zenith team received the Engineering Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Science. He is the only two-time recipient of Zenith's highest technical honor, the Robert Adler Technical Excellence Award (1988 and 1994) and was honored by the University of Washington for his pioneering efforts behind the ATSC Digital TV Standard that transformed the way we enjoy television today.
Bjorn's Audio Video
Although he never learned to play an instrument, Bjorn Dybdahl's love of music led him to found one of the country's most innovative and successful AV and custom install retailers, Bjorn's Audio Video, in northern San Antonio, insisting, "We sell entertainment and fun, not equipment."
Dybdahl was born June 4, 1943, in Oslo, Norway. When he was six, his parents immigrated to the U.S., settling in Minneapolis. The young Dybdahl soon developed a passion for classical music; his first record was what he thought was the theme for "The Lone Ranger" – the William Tell Overture. From there, Dybdahl discovered composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, literally wearing out records, which he played on a portable record player in his room. Like many kids in the 1950s, his first job was as a paperboy. He then was hired as a stock boy at Dayton's department store. These jobs made him realize how much he enjoyed dealing with customers.
Without a specific career goal after graduating from high school, Dybdahl joined the Air Force in December 1961. Five months later, he married his high school sweetheart Sharon (Shari). Stationed in San Antonio, Dybdahl soon realized he didn't want to make the Air Force a career and started college at St. Mary's University in San Antonio while still serving. He graduated in 1971 with a degree in political science.
In 1967, a year before leaving the Air Force, Dybdahl started working for Bill Case Sound, a small audio store in San Antonio, to discover if he could turn his hi-fi avocation into a profession. At first, Dybdahl thought he would move back to Minneapolis after leaving the service and open a hi-fi shop.
But upon his discharge, Dybdahl realized he had no money, a wife, a daughter, another child on the way, and that he hated snow. He continued to work for Case until the summer of 1975.
At loose ends, Dybdahl received encouragement from several old Case customers. One previous customer called Dybdahl and asked how much he needed to open his own hi-fi store. Dybdahl got a loan of $15,000 with no strings attached and, together with an SBA loan, was able to open a 1,000-square-foot store on October 1, 1975. He and a bookkeeper were the store's lone employees. Less than a year later, Dybdahl hired his second employee and a custom installer, although at the time, neither Dybdahl nor anyone else knew what a "custom installer" was.
Founded the year Sony introduced the Betamax and on the eve of the home video and home theater revolutions, Bjorn's began concentrating on "systems," before "home theater" was even a term, helping to introduce the latest home theater innovations to the San Antonio area. In 1976, Bjorn's introduced the first two-piece video projector; two years later, Dybdahl integrated a multi-channel Audio Pulse system with a large screen projector and a laserdisc player to create an early surround sound demo.
Bjorn's helped introduce the CD, and was one of the first to demo HDTV, home THX and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) TV. Bjorn's gave the first public demos of Dolby AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital), dual-layer DVD, HDTV and Pioneer's first plasma TV. In 2006, Bjorn's presented the first U.S. consumer demos of Blu-ray and HD-DVD and in 2007, one of the first 3DTV debuts with Texas Instruments and Mitsubishi. Dybdahl appeared as an HDTV spokesperson for Time Warner Cable TV ads, and has produced numerous broadcasts to educate consumers about HDTV.
Dybdahl was an early member of PARA and a founding member of CEDIA. Audio Video International magazine has named Bjorn's an Audio/Video Retailer of the Year every year since 1987, and in 2000, Frost & Sullivan presented Bjorn's with its Market Engineering Award for customer service leadership.
Bjorn's continues to grow, having expanded four times. Its current location, a 25,000 square foot building, is accompanied by a 25,000 square foot warehouse, an installation group staffed by a dozen installers and a service department. "Yes, Bjorn's still fixes stuff," Dybdahl says. He continues to prowl the show floor, helping customers on a regular basis.
Inventor of the computer mouse; father of hypermedia
Douglas Engelbart envisioned how to create, access and share ideas and information using computers, as well as how people could interact with one other and work together more effectively in a connected world.
To bring this holistic system into existence, Engelbart created windowed screen design, the user interface, hypermedia, collaborative computing, multimedia, knowledge management and the mouse. His seminal work beginning in the early 1960s led to the creation of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) now used on all computing devices, and laid the foundation for how and why most of us use computers and the Internet today.
Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 30, 1925, to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He attended Oregon State College (renamed Oregon State University) for a year, but was drafted, serving two years in the Navy. In 1948, he returned to Oregon State and earned a B.S. in electrical engineering. His first job out of college was at the Ames Research Center, run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA.
In 1951, Engelbart got engaged to his wife, Ballard and returned to school, earning a master's (1953) and a Ph.D. (1955) from the University of California at Berkeley in electrical engineering with a specialty in computers. He stayed on at Berkeley as an acting assistant professor, and in 1957, moved on to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International).
At SRI, Engelbart began to develop tools to augment how people and organizations collect, use and share information. One of these technologies was hypermedia, the linking of one piece of data to another, developed independently but simultaneously in 1964 with east coast-based Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia."
For Engelbart, hypermedia was part of a larger integrated system. The foundation of the first hypermedia groupware system was dubbed NLS (oN-Line System). To help navigate NLS, Engelbart experimented with "screen selection" devices – pointers to navigate information presented on a computer screen including a light pen, a foot pedal, a knee apparatus and even a helmet-mounted device.
In 1961, Engelbart envisioned a pointing device that would traverse a desktop on two small wheels, one turning horizontally, the other vertically, each transmitting rotation coordinates to determine the location of a floating on-screen pointer. Two years later, lead engineer Bill English built one from Engelbart's sketches. Encased in a carved out wooden block with perpendicular wheels mounted in the underbelly, it had only one button – that was all there was room for. Someone lost to history started calling it "the mouse."
Engelbart and his crew experimented with additional buttons, working up to five, before settling on three by 1968. SRI patented the mouse, naming Engelbart as its inventor.
At the Joint Computer Conference, a semi-annual meeting of major computing societies in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968, Engelbart conducted what has become known as "The Mother of All Demos," a seminal event in the history of contemporary computing. In front of 1,000 computer professionals, Engelbart and his geographically remote colleagues conducted the first public demonstration of the mouse, hypermedia and hyperlinking, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, idea/outline processing, collaborative groupware, and on-screen video teleconferencing – all brand new concepts and technologies at the time.
Engelbart also was involved in the development of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ARPANET. On Oct. 29, 1969, Engelbart's lab was at the receiving end of the first message transmitted over ARPANET, which would eventually lead to inception of the Internet.
In the early 1970s, several of Engelbart's ARC engineers landed at Xerox's new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), incorporating some of Engelbart's more tangible ideas into the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer with a GUI and a mouse. The GUI/mouse system developed for the Xerox Alto was later adapted for Apple and Windows operating systems.
In 1989, Engelbart, and his daughter, Christina, formed the non-profit Bootstrap Institute, which was renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute in 2008, and is now run by Christina.
Engelbart has been awarded 20 patents and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors including the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award (1987), the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1993), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (1997), induction into the Computer Hall of Fame and the U.S. National Medal of Technology, presented by President Bill Clinton (2000) and the Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition (2005).
Charlie Ergen is a bona fide gambler. In between jobs, he and a friend literally tried their hands in Las Vegas dealing blackjack and playing poker. But his biggest gamble was investing in the nascent satellite TV business, a bet that resulted in the founding of EchoStar and DISH, the pioneering satellite TV service.
Born March 1, 1953, Ergen's interest in technology may well have been influenced by his birthplace – Oak Ridge, Tenn., a sleepy village built into a factory town by the federal government during World War II to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb – and by his father, William, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist. Ergen's interest in business may have come from his mother, Viola, who was business manager of the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge.
Ergen earned a bachelor's degree in general business and accounting from the University of Tennessee, and an M.B.A. from Wake Forest University. His first job out of school was as a CPA and financial analyst for Frito-Lay, from 1976-1978.
By 1980, Ergen and a friend, Jim DeFranco, drifted to Las Vegas to make their way as professional gamblers. But they were evicted from a Las Vegas casino for card counting. Once again at loose ends, DeFranco spotted a truck carrying a large C-band satellite dish and a business idea was hatched. DeFranco, Ergen and Ergen's wife, Cantey – known as Candy – started EchoSphere, a door-to-door C-band satellite TV sales and installation business.
The trio pooled $60,000 in savings, bought two satellite dishes and headed to Colorado – they figured folks got poor over-the-air reception in the mountainous state. Ergen and DeFranco would drive to rural towns to deliver the C-band dishes for up to $15,000 plus $600 for installation, a dollar per mile more past 50 miles outside of Denver – unless the pair was allowed to rest for the night at the customer's home.
By 1985, EchoSphere had earned more than $100 million in revenue. But Ergen believed the only real path to growth was to launch his own satellite. In 1987, Ergen and DeFranco applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) license, which was approved in 1992.
Ergen contracted with China to launch his bird, and on Dec. 28, 1995, a rocket bearing EchoStar I was launched successfully from Xichang, China. DISH, with a newly-built satellite uplink center in Cheyenne, Wyo., began broadcasting in March the following year. A second satellite was launched and a second customer service center was opened later that year.
Within four months, DISH reached the 100,000 subscriber milestone and the company celebrated its millionth customer following the launch of EchoStar III on Oct. 5, 1997, from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Two years later, EchoStar bought the broadcasting assets of a satellite broadcasting joint-venture between News Corporation's ASkyB and MCI Worldcom, more than doubling DISH's continental U.S. broadcasting capacity. In 1999, DISH unveiled the DISH 500, the world's first satellite TV system, with more than 500 channels. In 2000, DISH released its first HDTV receiver. Over a six-month period straddling 1999-2000, its stock rose from $5 to $79.
Ergen also fought for the satellite broadcast industry by helping secure passage of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act in 1999, which allowed satellite broadcasters to carry local stations.
By August 2003, DISH had launched EchoStar IX from a floating platform at the equator, the first Ka satellite; in all, DISH has launched a dozen satellites. By 2004, DISH became the first satellite TV service to offer local channels to all 50 states, the first to develop a UHF remote control and the first to sell a satellite receiver for less than $200. In 2012, DISH unveiled the Hopper, a whole-home HD DVR system that can record six channels simultaneously and allows customers to automatically skip commercials on most PrimeTime Anytime DISH programming.
In May 2011, Ergen stepped down from his role as president and CEO to become chairman of the board. When not tending to DISH business, Ergen climbs mountains. A member of the Colorado Mountain Club, Ergen is has climbed each of the state's 14,000-foot peaks, as well as Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Aconcagua in Argentina and the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal.
His biggest achievement, however, is his 30-year-plus marriage to his wife, Candy, and their five children.
ITA (International Tape Association)
Audio cassettes were still a curiosity in the late 1960s, and videotape was used only in television studios. But a Los Angeles restaurateur, radio and TV personality, music recording pioneer and entrepreneur named Larry Finley saw the future of both audio and video tape, founding the ITA (International Tape Association) in 1970. ITA and its later incarnations – IRMA (International Recording Media Association) and, today, the CDSA (Content Delivery & Security Association) – played pivotal roles in establishing the home recording and video business.
Born May 4, 1913, in Syracuse, N.Y., Finley and his cousins built crystal radio sets like many boys in the early 1920s – except Finley sold them to families who wanted to hear radio broadcasts in their homes. His youngest cousin, Rod Serling, became fascinated by these radios and would go on to write radio plays and create The Twilight Zone.
Finley began his long and eclectic professional career at 18 as manager of a local nightclub, the Cafe DeWitt. Enticed by the glamour of Hollywood, he moved to Los Angeles and opened Finley's Credit Jewelers in Burbank, adding stores in Hollywood and throughout the LA area. To promote his burgeoning business, Finley staged street dances and concerts featuring famous musicians.
In 1944, Finley opened the Casino Gardens Ballroom in San Diego, partnering with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. After the ballroom closed, Finley moved back to Los Angeles in the early 1950s opened up Larry Finley's restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, next door to the world famous Mocambo. On the heels of his MC'ing experience at Casino Gardens, Finley decided to initiate a radio show on KFWB, The Larry Finley Show, broadcast nightly from his restaurant. He recorded his shows on the latest audio tape format, and syndicated them around the country.
In 1954, Finley produced an early 24-hour TV telethon, raising more than $l.5 million for the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., for which he received the Los Angeles City of Hope Torchbearer Award.
Finley also became an early television pioneer; Finley Productions Inc. was the first west coast independent TV production company. He hosted a series of music-based local TV shows in the late 1950s on KTLA-TV and KABC-TV. Finley kinescoped and sent these shows by the Armed Forces Network to troops in Korea.
On radio and TV, Finley interviewed the biggest entertainers of the day and introduced new stars, including Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Lou Rawls, Johnny Ray, Les Paul and Mary Ford. He also became friendly with entertainment industry heavyweights such as Howard Hughes, Louella Parsons, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, and Walter Winchell.
In 1960, Finley moved to New York City and became president of Tops Records, and later, director of sales at MGM Records. Recognizing the potential of 8-track tape, Finley founded the International Tape Cartridge Corporation (ITCC) in 1965. Finley acquired audio tape rights from the leading 27 record labels, making ITCC the largest provider of entertainment on 8-track tape. During that year, Finley held the exclusive rights and licenses for all music on 8-track tape. Philips licensed much of Finley's catalog for use on its new compact audio cassette format.
In late 1969, Finley was approached to start an association for this new, quickly developing cassette tape industry. ITA was formed in 1970 with eight member companies, including Panasonic, Philips and TDK.
To establish quality and ethics standards within the tape industry, Finley contacted 3M, the major supplier of blank tape at the time, and convinced them to adhere to a labeling standard. Finley also fought successfully to keep commercial and consumer analog tape format decisions out of government hands.
In 1979, Finley left ITA and formed Larry Finley Associates, which acquired programming for home video. He also became a proponent of the VHS format, and by so doing, became known as the Father of Video Tape. He encouraged JVC to license its VHS technology to duplicators and loaders, which allowed third-party vendors to produce and distribute video tape titles around the world – the basis of the entire packaged home video business. In 1984, he was inducted into the Video Hall of Fame.
Finley passed away on April 3, 2000, at his home in Long Island, N.Y. "It takes a great man to create a business, but it takes a visionary to create an entire industry," said a former associate. "Larry Finley was such a visionary."
h.h. gregg
A man bought a TV from a new electronics and appliance store. Over a holiday weekend, the TV stopped working. The customer called the store's owner – at home. The owner told the customer to meet him at the store with the broken TV in 20 minutes. The owner unlocked the store and got the customer a new TV.
That story sums up the successful five decade-plus customer-focused "Our progress will come through satisfying the customer" philosophy of Indianapolis-based h.h. gregg and its founders Henry Harold Gregg, better known as "Hine," and his wife, Fansy. It is this philosophy that has allowed h.h. gregg to grow from one small storefront into a nearly 200-store national chain generating more than $2 billion in sales.
Hine, a Navy veteran of World War II, was managing the Biddle Screw Products appliance store in Sheridan, a small town 25 miles northwest of Indianapolis. Fansy was the home service director for the Gibson Company in Indianapolis and traveled around Indiana and Illinois teaching retailers to sell and operate appliances and giving customer demonstrations. She would also go to homes and instruct owners how to operate new-fangled automatic clothes washers. One of her Gibson training stops in 1949 was at Biddle, where she met Hine.
Hine moved to Indianapolis to take a job as an appliance salesman for A.C. Zickler at 4930 North Keystone Avenue and later became store manager. Two years after they married, Hine and Fansy used $3,000 they had saved and purchased A.C. Zickler's 800-square-foot showroom, opening on April 15, 1955. The Gregg's sold Admiral, RCA, Spartan and Whirlpool washing machines, clothes dryers, refrigerators and outdoor grills out front while Zickler continued to run his plumbing business in the rear. They soon also started selling "brown goods" including black-and-white TVs.
A newspaper ad six months later exclaimed "APPLIANCES at ZICKLER'S," with "h.h. gregg, Proprietor" listed at the bottom. Hine served as the sales force while Fansy was in charge of the office. More importantly, that ad also asserted "We Will Be Here Tomorrow to Service the Appliance You Buy Today."
The Gregg's used off-duty firemen as delivery men, or Hine and the customer would load the goods into the store's old red pick-up truck and make the delivery.
Gregg's started to really grow once they started selling color TVs. On January 1, 1960, the couple invited guests to their home to watch the football bowl games on their RCA color TV. After three years of these personal demos, the couple added a "color room" to their new 5,200-square-foot headquarters, three blocks from the former Zickler store and began hosting their annual New Year's Day football festivities there.
The business' growth didn't diminish the Gregg's dedication to customer service. Hine took the store's TV "tube caddie" home with him in case he had to personally make a house call to fix a tube.
Mrs. Gregg's son, Gerald Throgmartin, joined the company after 10 years of sales experience at Sears. Her other son, Don, came aboard in 1969, and two years later went to manage the firm's second store in Kokomo, Indiana, for 10 years. Also in 1971, the Gregg's opened their third store, on the south side of Indianapolis.
Hine died in 1974, the same year a fourth location opened in Anderson, Indiana, and Gerald took over day-to-day management of the company. The following year, a fifth h.h. gregg's opened on Indianapolis' east side, just as Hine and Fansy's grandson, Jerry Throgmartin, joined the business while still a teenager. Fansy continued to work until 1983 before retiring to Florida. She passed in 2004.
In 1989, Gerald Throgmartin became chairman and CEO, while his son Jerry was promoted to president and COO. In 1999, when there were 19 h.h. gregg stores, Jerry became company chairman, CEO and director. A fourth generation of Throgmartins joined the family business when Jerry's son Gregg started work in early 2001. In 2007, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Thanks to Jerry Throgmartin's leadership and stewardship of Hine and Fansy's devotion to customer service, h.h. gregg's now has 190 locations with stores in 15 states including Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Pittsburgh, South Carolina and Virginia. Jerry unexpectedly passed away in January 2012 at the age of 57.
Getting into business with friends and family – especially in-laws – can be a trying experience. But Koo In Hwoi, founding chairman of LG, believed in "harmony among people." At the time of the company's founding, LG was run by several families and organized by close acquaintances, including in-laws. Koo's harmonious business philosophy promoted consensus-based decision-making and support followed by full compliance once a decision was made.
Koo's "noiseless" business management turned LG into a $120 billion global conglomerate comprising 44 different companies including chemicals, telecommunications and, of course, Korea's first consumer electronics products.
Koo was born on Aug. 27, 1907, in Jisu-myun, South Gyeongsang province. Raised in a traditional noble family emphasizing Confucian values, he studied the Chinese classics during his childhood. When he turned 14, he married Eul Su Huh. After graduating from Jisu Elementary School, he went to Jungang High School in Seoul. In 1931, he returned to his hometown and, capitalizing on his experience in running a co-op, he opened his own draper called Koo In Hwoi Store in Jinju and began his career as an entrepreneur.
Shortly after national liberation from Japanese rule following World War II, Koo relocated the base of his business to Busan. He began selling cosmetics, but also decided to produce a cosmetics cream himself and established Lak Hui – pronounced "lucky" in January 1947, the first half of what would become LG.
The success of Lucky Cream cleared the way for LG to become the first Korean company to enter into the plastics industry. He marketed various plastic household products, including combs, toothbrushes and dishware. He also developed and produced quality Korean toothpaste that replaced U.S.-made Colgate as the top seller in Korea.
While growing the plastics business, Koo also established GoldStar Co. Ltd. in 1958, the first Korean electronics company. A year later, GoldStar produced Korea's first home-grown consumer electronics product, the A-501 dual-band (medium and shortwave) tabletop radio. This led to a streak of "Korea's first" products, including telephones, fans, refrigerators, television sets and washing machines, which brought tremendous change to the lives of Koreans and accelerated the country's rise as a global player in electronics and IT. Lak Hui and GoldStar merged in 1995 to establish the modern incarnation of LG.
Koo went on to found a number of companies in the chemical and electronics industries, including a cable manufacturing company in 1962 that produced cables for electricity and telecommunications installations. Koo's companies also played an important role in building much-needed infrastructure in Korea, including telecommunications, by founding a company that produced switchboards and public telephones.
Koo established GoldStar's first overseas branch in New York in 1968, the same year it manufactured Korea's first air conditioner.
For the company, Koo's most important contribution was his business philosophy and management principles – harmony among people, a pioneering spirit and R&D leadership – which are upheld to this day. Koo also called on his employees to become pioneers. He saw R&D not as a reckless challenge, but as an essential component to turn this pioneering spirit into a driver of success. He valued engineers and made strenuous efforts to develop new products and new technology.
"Find something that others did not try yet," Koo said. "Begin with something that is essential to people's living. Once you begin, continue to move forward. Even if you succeed, do not stop there; challenge yourself to something higher, greater and more difficult."
In 1968, he built and donated the Yonam Library in Jinju, his hometown. Shortly before his death on Dec. 31, 1969, he established the Yonam Foundation – currently LG Yonam Foundation, a public service corporation which offers systematic professional support in culture and education - and left it as his final gift to Korean society.
Korean society.
Byung-chull Lee played a vital role in building South Korea's industrial landscape by establishing and operating more than 30 companies for nearly 50 years in industries ranging from import substituting goods to high technologies.
Lee's business philosophy comprised of "economical contribution to the nation," "priority to human resources" and "pursuit of rationality." Lee founded and managed companies under this philosophy and cultivated them to be the best. He is considered South Korea's leading pioneer businessman who contributed greatly to the development of society through various cultural, art and educational businesses.
Lee was born in Uiryong-gun, Kyongsangnam-do, Korea, on Feb. 12 1910, the youngest of four children. In 1930, Lee went to Japan to study economics at Waseda University. Upon his return to Korea, he decided to devote himself to running a business under the belief that building Korea's economy was the most urgent task. In March 1938, Lee founded Samsung Trading Company to carry out his philosophy of making an "economical contribution to the nation."
After the success of Samsung Trading Company, Lee took over Chosun Brewery, laying out the foundation for Samsung. In the early 1950s, he expanded into businesses such as sugar, wool and paper manufacturing. He also contributed to the development of the financial industry through insurance and banking businesses, playing a significant role in rebuilding the national economy in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War.
In the 1960s, Lee was at the forefront of building Korea's key industries by engaging in businesses encompassing fertilizer, electronics, retail, clothing, textile, media and land development. As part of his efforts to stabilize people's livelihood by enhancing self-sufficiency in food, Lee founded Korea Fertilizer in 1967, which was the world's biggest single production facility. He helped boost the country's exports, led the development of heavy chemical and defense industries and contributed to the development of high technology industries including semiconductor, aviation, fine chemicals and computers.
Lee established a network of TV broadcasting, newspapers and other publications, marking an important milestone in the development of Korea's media culture. His Ho-Am Art Museum helped foster pride among Koreans in their cultural heritage among, and with the Samsung Foundation of Culture, he promoted a culture of morals and advanced the arts.
Lee's foresight that the future of his business relied on the electronics industry led him to found Samsung Electronics in 1969. The company has become the world's largest IT company that leads the global TV, mobile phone, memory and LCD (liquid crystal display) markets.
In 1973, Samsung Electronics developed a 19-inch transistor black-and-white television. Following the success of this television, the company expanded into other electronics products including refrigerators and washing machines. By 1981, the company had manufactured more than 10 million black-and-white televisions.
Samsung Electronics expanded into the semiconductor business in 1974, acquiring Korea Semiconductor, and entered the telecommunications business by acquiring Korea Telecommunications in 1980. In 1983, Lee made what has come to be known as the "Tokyo Declaration," announcing that Samsung Electronics would enter the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) business. A year later, the company became the third company in the world to develop 64K DRAM. In 1984, it introduced the world's first 256K DRAM and later started mass production of 1Mega DRAM, helping South Korea become a semiconductor powerhouse and setting the groundwork for the company to be the global technology leader.
Lee was one of Korea's most highly-regarded businessmen and his pen name, Ho-Am, means "filling up a space with clear water as lakes do, and being unshakeable as a large rock," in reference to his magnanimity and volition as a businessman.
After his death on Nov. 19, 1987, he was awarded the Korean Order of Civil Merit, Mugunghwa Medal by the Korean government and the First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government. In honoring his father, Samsung Electronics Chairman Kun-hee Lee established The Ho-Am Prize. Since 1991, Koreans who have made distinguishable accomplishments in the fields of science, engineering, medicine, arts and community service have been awarded Ho-Am Prizes annually.
CCD imaging chip
Like he did almost every day, Dr. George E. Smith wandered into the office of his boss, Willard Boyle, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., on Sept. 8, 1969, for their usual brainstorming session. Less than an hour later, they emerged with the single most important invention in the history of photography – the charged-couple device (CCD), the imaging sensor chip which ignited the digital camera revolution.
This was not what they intended to create at all.
Smith was born in White Plains, N.Y., on May 10, 1930. Smith's parents could not afford to send him to college, so upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Navy. After attending aerograph school – Navy speak for meteorology – he was assigned to the Navy Hurricane Weather Central in Miami. The Navy was slated to kill a research project aimed at finding the location of hurricanes using seismographs to measure the vibrations made in the ocean floor. Smith designed a different seismographic method and saved the project.
Smith also took courses at the University of Miami. He worked part-time jobs at the university, running an ancient mechanical differential analyzer and making basic measurements on semiconductors.
Back from the Navy, Smith entered the University of Pennsylvania as a sophomore, earning his B.A. in physics in 1955. He moved west and earned his master's (1956) and his Ph.D. (1959) in physics from the University of Chicago, submitting one of the shortest doctoral thesis on record – just three pages on "The Anomalous Skin Effect in Bismuth."
Following graduation, Smith joined Bell Laboratories, where researchers were given the latitude to work on what interested them. In 1964, he became head of the Device Concepts Department, a group formed to devise next-generation solid-state devices.
On that fall afternoon in 1969, Smith and his boss convened to brainstorm about semiconductor integrated circuits. They had been asked to examine whether it was possible to devise a form of bubble memory using semiconductors.
Smith had been involved with an effort to create an electron beam imaging tube for the Picturephone, with a target consisting of an array of silicon diodes. After jotting some notes on the blackboard, Smith realized what they were devising could store data, and would also be an image sensor. The CCD takes advantage of the solid-state equivalent of the photoelectric effect that won Albert Einstein his Nobel Prize in 1921.
According to Smith, "metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) capacitors were already being extensively studied as the gate structure for MOS transistors, which form the basis of today's vast integrated circuit technology. Charge stored on these capacitors could represent digital information for memory – no charge for a zero and maximum charge for a one – devices or analog information formed by incident light and the solid state equivalent of the photoelectric effect, the amount of charge being proportional to the light intensity."
The first model based on their idea was constructed and successfully demonstrated a few weeks later. The device was publicly announced in 1970, and was quickly picked up by several companies including Fairchild, RCA and Texas Instruments. Bell Labs also developed and demonstrated a CCD camera for Picturephone but the effort was terminated when AT&T decided not to develop a Picturephone network.
A researcher at Kodak, CEA Hall of Famer Steve Sasson, procured CCD chips from Fairchild and, in December 1975, built the first working digital camera. But before the CCD was used in the first consumer digital cameras in 1994, it was installed in the Hubble Telescope in 1990 to snap digital photos of distant galaxies.
Smith has been a member of Pi Mu Epsilon, Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, was made a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds 31 U.S. patents and is the author of more than 40 papers. Since 1970, Boyle and Smith have received several awards for their accomplishment and, in 2009, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for the invention of the CCD.
Smith retired from Bell Laboratories as head of the VLSI Device Department in April 1986. He then started a world cruise aboard his 9.5-meter sailboat, APOGEE, which he completed in 2003 after 55,000 miles of ocean sailing. He lives in Barnegat, N.J.
It's not as far from a small logging community in north Quebec, Canada, to Stockholm, Sweden as you might think. Willard Boyle made only a slight detour through Murray Hill, N.J., on his way to collecting a Nobel Prize with his fellow Bell Labs researcher George E. Smith for co-inventing the CCD (charged-couple device), the first digital imaging chip, which transformed the world of photography.
Boyle was born on Aug. 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and was raised in the village of Wallace until his family moved to Chaudiere, Quebec. His father was the local physician, and Boyle was home schooled by his mother, who believed in the Socratic method of teaching. She asked him questions that required detailed explanations as answers. Boyle described her as a curious woman, and through her teaching, he developed a strong curiosity as well.
When he was 14, Boyle began his formal education at Lower Canada College in Montreal. He continued to pursue his scientific interests at McGill University, but in 1943, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and learned to land Spitfire fighter planes on aircraft carriers.
Boyle later returned to McGill, where he met his wife, Betty, whom he married in 1946. He completed his bachelor's, master's and finally his Ph.D. in physics in 1950. After earning his doctorate, he remained at McGill in Canada's Radiation Laboratory for a year, and then spent two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1953, Boyle took a job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. In 1962, he worked with Don Nelson to create the first continuously operating ruby laser, and, with David Thomas, was awarded a patent that helped lead to the development of the semiconductor injection laser, found in many electronic appliances. That same year, Boyle was named director of space science and exploratory studies at Bellcomm, a division of Bell Labs in Washington, D.C. While at Bellcomm, he worked on the Apollo program, and helped select lunar landing sites. Boyle returned to Bell Labs in 1964.
On September 8, 1969, Boyle entertained fellow researcher and CE Hall of Fame inductee George Smith in his office for one of their regular brainstorming sessions. That day's assignment: forming bubble memory using semiconductors.
After jotting some notes on the blackboard, Smith realized what they were devising could not only store data, but also could be an image sensor. The pair worked quickly, and within an hour had essentially created a digital imaging chip, the CCD. "[We] knew we had something special," Boyle said later. "We are the ones who started this profusion of little cameras all over the world."
The first model based on Boyle's and Smith's ideas was constructed and demonstrated a few weeks later. The device was publically announced early in 1970 and was quickly picked up by several companies.
A researcher at Kodak, CE Hall of Famer Steve Sasson, built the first working digital camera in 1975. CCDs would soon appear in any gadget that captured images or video, including cell phones, copiers, satellites, fax machines, and the cameras that roamed Mars and the ocean floor.
Boyle retired from Bell Labs in 1979 as executive director of the Communication Science Division, holding 18 patents. Retired at 55, he sailed his 33-foot boat for six leisurely weeks up the inland waterway from New Jersey, through the New York Harbor, up to Quebec and down the St. Lawrence to the house the Boyles had built in Wallace, Nova Scotia.
Over the years, Boyle has been honored many times including winning the Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute (1973), the Morris Lieberman Award of the IEEE (1974), the Progress Medal of the Photographic Society of America, the Breakthrough Award by the Device Research Conference of the IEEE, the Edwin H. Land Medal from the Optical Society of America (2001), the Charles Stark Draper Prize from National Academy of Engineering (2006), and, with Smith in 2009, the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of the CCD. He was inducted into the Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame in 2005.
Boyle lived in Wallace until his death on May 7, 2011.
Inventor, Home Video Game
Few people can claim to have invented a billion dollar industry. Ralph Baer, who in 1966 invented the first home video game system, is one of them.
Baer was born March 8, 1922, in Pirmasens, Germany. His parents Leo and Lotte left the young Ralph alone to play with his Erector set, which he did when he wasn't reading anything he could get his hands on, especially books on science. "I practically lived in the library," he later noted.
Along with all other Jews, Baer was expelled from school by the Nazis, ending his primary education. The Baer family left Germany in August of 1938, just three months before Crystal Night, when the major pogroms began. The family settled in New York City, where Baer ran three radio service stores from 1939 until 1943, when he joined the U.S. Army.
Baer was assigned to the Army's Military Intelligence Service and served in England, France and, briefly, in Germany, becoming an Army expert in foreign small arms.
Before and during the war, Baer enrolled in numerous correspondence courses to make up for his lack of education after the age of 16. Following the war, Baer enrolled in an accredited engineering program thanks to the G.I. Bill, earning a B.S. in television engineering in 1948 from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Upon graduation, Baer went to work for Loral Corp., where he built a projection TV set from scratch and speculated on building in a primitive form a video game. However, Loral's chief engineer nixed the idea. Baer left Loral one year later and, together with Loral's chief engineer, founded a military electronics business in New York City. In 1958, he joined Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, which later became a division of Lockheed. Over the course of his 30-year career with Sanders, Baer ran a division of some 500 engineers, technicians and support people, becoming an Engineering Fellow in 1975.
His experiences with both small arms and television technology provided the impetus for his idea to use ordinary home TV sets for interactive game play. In 1966, Baer wrote a four-page treatise that laid out the entire concept of home video games. Seeing promise, Sanders management provided a small amount of funding.
In March 1967, Baer set technician Bill Harrison and engineer Bill Rusch to work part-time on developing several demonstration systems. Over the next nine months, the group developed a large number of games using the relatively primitive but cost-effective technology of that period.
As early as December of 1967, Baer's team was playing ping-pong, handball and shooting at the screen with a light gun. The activity culminated in the development of the "Brown Box," a multi-game console.
In 1969, Baer demonstrated the Brown Box to most of the major television set manufacturers and signed a patent licensing agreement with Magnavox. The engineering group then took the Brown Box and designed a production model, the Odyssey system, which officially went on sale in 1972.
While not an initial sales success — consumers first thought Odyssey would work only on Magnavox TVs — Baer's ideas were quickly emulated, often illegally. Atari released the arcade game, Pong, and later became the first licensee under the Baer, Rusch and Harrison patents. In 1978, Baer developed Simon, a single-chip, microprocessor-controlled memory game that became a best-seller for Milton Bradley, and is still available from Hasbro.
Over his 50-year engineering and inventing career, Baer accumulated more than 150 patents worldwide. By 2010, the business he and the Magnavox Odyssey system inaugurated topped $25 billion in revenue. In 2004 Baer received the National Medal of Technology from President George W. Bush. In 2007 he was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by the Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. In 2008 he received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka (Sony) award for Excellence in Consumer Electronics. In 2010 Baer was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Baer was married to Dena Whinston Baer for 53 years, until she passed away in 2006. They have three children and four grandchildren.
Leading CE and Technology Journalist
Co-Founder, CEO
Starting with a $10,000 investment and a 1,000-square-foot space, Sandy Bloomberg grew the electronics store Tweeter into the largest high-end specialty retailer in the country.
Bloomberg was born in Boston on June 19, 1951, into a family steeped in retail as far back as 1889. His father, Harvey, and his uncle, were the second-generation owners of a furniture store chain. His father focused on buying, advertising, merchandising and customer service, priorities he handed down to his son.
Bloomberg attended Boston University (B.U.) while working full-time at the Harvard Square branch of Audio Lab, one of the first audio component specialty retailers in the country. After quitting school in his sophomore year, Bloomberg traveled to Europe where he noticed there was greater appreciation for high-end stereo components and a host of high-end specialty retailers. Upon his return to the U.S., Bloomberg and his cousin Michael Bloomberg each put in $5,000, and on Valentine's Day 1972, they opened their first Tweeter store near B.U. in a 1,000-square-foot retail space.
Bloomberg credits the easy, extended terms offered by Japanese manufacturers, most still looking for footholds in the U.S. market, for Tweeter's early success. Merchandise bought on 120-day terms was sold in 30 days, supplying cash to expand the business.
A year-and-a-half later, the pair moved to a larger retail location near B.U., and opened a second store in the audio store crowded Harvard Square. During this post "Sgt. Pepper's" period, when rock musicians started producing more sophisticated work in the studio, nearly all component stores were strategically located near colleges where high-end audio gear was considered not simply a luxury, but a necessity.
Tweeter grew fast thanks to a franchise model, allowing many Tweeter employees to open their own outlets. Many of these stores were located in suburban Massachusetts malls, following the migration of the college demographic as they graduated and started families. As the company continued to grow, Bloomberg wanted more control over merchandising and product mix and began to buy back the franchises.
Bloomberg's product mix focused on exclusive items not offered by other retailers. Tweeter was one of the first area dealers to sell gear from Nakamichi, Yamaha, Boston Acoustics and Bang & Olufsen. In 1976, the stores started selling and installing car stereo, and a few years later, expanded into the new high-end video category.
Tweeter began to earn a reputation for its exclusive products and knowledgeable, well-trained sales team. Prospective employees went through an intensive five-and-a-half-week training program to create a confident, service-oriented sales staff that often won out over big box retailer prices. The store�s slogans stressed Tweeter's mix of exclusive high-end products and expertise: "Audio, video and a boatload of know-how," and "Some hi-fi salesman can sell you anything. The problem is they do."
Expansion continued in the mid-1980s when Tweeter opened Media Systems, one of the first high-end custom installation showrooms, in Boston. In 1979, Tweeter had six stores in the Boston area. By the end of 1986, there were 13 Tweeter stores in the U.S.
Competition, especially on price, arose from new national retailer chains. On August 16, 1993, soon after the chain reached 20 stores, Bloomberg introduced the first automatic price protection (APP). Tweeter checked the prices listed in all the local electronics' stores newspaper ads. If a customer bought an item and Tweeter found that same item advertised at a lower price within 30 days, the company automatically sent a check to the consumer for the price difference. The program was so innovative, it was reported on in the Wall Street Journal.
The first year APP was available Tweeter sales grew more than 20 percent. Over the course of the program, Tweeter sent out more than 100,000 checks.
In 1996, Tweeter went on a national buying spree, acquiring 10 chains and reaching a peak of more than 150 stores with more than 3,000 employees. However, new and expanding big box retailers began to challenge Tweeter's exclusive merchandise mix and sales staff training and service. On Dec. 2, 2008, the remaining Tweeter stores closed for good.
However, the company's focus on buying, advertising, merchandising and customer service left an indelible mark on the consumer electronics retailing industry. In 1997, Bloomberg received the Entrepreneur of the Year award from the New England chapter of Deloitte Touche.
Bloomberg is now a partner at cabinet home theater speaker maker ZVOX Audio. He and his wife, Carolina, have two children, Joshua and Mikaela.
Leading Video Technology Journalist
Lancelot Lawford Braithwaite has likely forgotten more about how video gadgets work than most tech reporters ever knew. Braithwaite transformed himself from an English professor and video engineer into one of the most respected video technology writers of his generation.
Braithwaite was born on November 29, 1936, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, to Ena Delores and Lawton Lawford Braithwaite. His father, a lawyer, civil servant and Conveyancer of Crown Lands, introduced him to electricity by letting him fix hot plates and lamps when he was as young as five-years-old, the same age he received his first camera. His father also influenced his interest in physics, chemistry, biology and technical writing. Braithwaite's mother — an office manager, teacher and piano instructor — also encouraged his study habits.
Braithwaite's childhood was filled with tinkering. With friends he would rebuild wrecked cars, and he hung around a neighbor's ham radio shack. He parlayed a fourth-place prize in a photo contest to his first paying job, as a wedding photographer, and at times, funerals — he once photographed a dead woman in her coffin, a job no adult photographer wanted. But not all of his interests were benign. He hurt his eyes and was forced to wear glasses for a few years when an attempt to make fireworks literally blew up in his face.
Braithwaite enrolled at New York University to study engineering physics, electrical engineering, accounting and finance, eventually earning a Bachelor of Science in what is now Communications Arts from NYU in 1964.
While at NYU, Braithwaite served as head lighting and sound technician for plays and operas at the school's Hall of Fame Playhouse, including Hal Holbrook's first New York presentation of Mark Twain Tonight. He also served as a gaffer for the play, The Fantastiks, as well as for Martin Scorsese's first film, It's Not Just You Murray, shot while both were still students at NYU.
He then spent six months training at RCA Institutes (now TCI) for camera work, technical directing and lighting. Braithwaite soon got a job at WWOR TV and radio in New York. He helped the radio station get back on the air during the great Northeast blackout on November 9, 1965, by jumping the phone lines from the FM transmitter site on the top of the then-powerless Empire State Building to a phone line at the AM transmitter site in New Jersey.
When looking for a sound system, Braithwaite couldn't afford good speakers, so he decided to buy the best headphones available instead. Dissatisfied with the available information on headphones, he conducted his own research and comparisons. A friend introduced him to Ivan Berger, an established audio tech writer. Berger saw Braithwaite's research and suggested that he shouldn't be reading reviews, but writing them. Berger off-loaded a column to Braithwaite — reviewing hi-fi equipment for FM Guide New York.
Braithwaite contributed articles to CB World and Popular Electronics magazines while spending the next five years as an assistant professor of English at Penn State University.
In October 1978, Jay Rosenfield, publisher of Video Magazine, approached Berger to become the magazine's technical editor. Berger, a respected audio writer asked Braithwaite to be a joint technical editor. The two agreed on a combined byline – Berger-Braithwaite Labs. Their first issue in the spring of 1979 included six joint reviews.
Berger typed while the two argued in print about their conclusions. Their differing viewpoints — Braithwaite stressing performance, Berger insistent on ease of use — morphed into insightful, thorough reviews that proved to be popular with readers. Braithwaite soon became the industry's most authoritative and respected video equipment reviewer.
In 1982, Berger became technical editor of Audio Magazine, but Braithwaite stayed at Video and continued to write under the Berger-Braithwaite Labs byline. After 20 years at Video, the magazine was folded into Sound & Vision and Braithwaite went to work as technical editor for Good Housekeeping's brandwise.com website in 1999.
Recognizing that new-fangled digital cameras would need "digital film," in 1988 Dr. Eli Harari co-founded and led SanDisk, helping launch the flash memory revolution to become the global leader in flash memory cards.
Harari was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1945. His parents came to Palestine from Poland in 1933, as Nazism was on the rise in Germany. At age 17, while studying in a boarding school in England, Harari met his future wife, whom he married in 1972.
Harari put himself through Manchester University in England, graduating with honors with a Bachelor of Science in physics. In 1973, Harari earned a PhD in solid state sciences from Princeton University under a research scholarship from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The newly-minted young physicist worked on space-borne electronics in early satellites at Hughes Microelectronics. In his spare time, he would check out consumer products, and was soon dabbling in prototypes for new fishing rods and self-illuminating screwdrivers. It was his wife who suggested that he apply his physics expertise to invent new semiconductor memory devices.
From 1973 to 1983, Harari held research and management positions with Hughes, Intel and Honeywell. In 1975 while at Hughes, he invented the industry's first commercial floating-gate electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), a precursor to flash.
In 1983, he founded Waferscale Integration, a startup company in Silicon Valley, serving as the company's president and chief executive officer until 1986 and as chairman and chief technical officer until 1988.
After a dispute with the board over strategy and direction, Harari was forced out of the company he founded. He started working on SunDisk, which later became SanDisk. Soon Harari recruited Sanjay Mehrotra, a former memory chip designer whom he met at Intel, and Jack Yuan, a former Hughes colleague and chip process engineer. The three founded SanDisk in a two-room office in Santa Clara, CA.
Under Harari's leadership, SanDisk's small team of engineers invented a revolutionary concept they named "system flash," which required radically new flash memory chip architecture, tightly coupled to a dedicated controller. This combination overcame flash's inherent deficiencies and led to the industry's first flash-based solid state drive (SSD). These smaller, more power-efficient SSDs were able to mimic a standard hard disk drive (HDD) with increased durability.
Armed with funding from venture capitalists, AT&T and Western Digital, SanDisk developed its first 4-megabit flash chips and dedicated controller chips, and then outbid Intel, Texas Instruments and Western Digital to nab IBM as its first customer.
SanDisk shrunk the technology by inventing multi-level "cell" flash, which allowed more data to be stored on each physical cell. This advancement and other innovations became the foundation for today's flash memory products, resulting in the price of flash memory to consumers dropping by a factor of 50,000.
Harari believed consumer markets would accelerate once industry-standard card formats were adopted. So SanDisk licensed its unique patents to competitors, and invited industry giants such as Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba to participate in developing standard card formats. In addition to CompactFlash and SD cards, SanDisk invented the microSD card, the USB flash drive and embedded memory for the quickly growing mobile phone market.
In 1999, the total flash memory market totaled less than $1 billion. Harari predicted the flash memory market would reach the size of the HDD and DRAM markets within a decade. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, Harari's prediction is coming to fruition; the total flash memory market approached $25 billion in 2011 while growing at a faster pace than any competing memory technology.
Harari holds nearly 150 U.S. and foreign patents. Along with SanDisk co-founders Mehrotra and Yuan, Harari received the 2006 Reynold B. Johnson Data Storage Device Technology Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 2008, he received the Global Semiconductor Alliance's Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, and in 2009 received the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal recognizing his "leadership in the development and commercialization of flash memory technology."
When Harari retired as SanDisk CEO and chairman of the board at the end of 2010, SanDisk was an S&P 500 company with 3,330 employees worldwide, revenues of $4.8 billion and the leading company with a 37 percent share of the global flash memory card market, more than twice that of its nearest competitor.
Hubbard Broadcasting
Chairman and CEO
Stanley Hubbard was literally born to be a broadcaster. Taking over a radio empire founded by his father during the dawn of broadcasting, Hubbard formed United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB) in 1981, becoming one of the first — and most persistent — proponents of direct broadcast satellite.
Ten years before Hubbard was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hubbard's father, Stanley E. Hubbard, founded WAMD — one of the nation's first radio stations to rely solely on the sale of advertising for income — which later became the 50,000-watt station KSTP.
Growing up, the young Hubbard was interested in electronics, especially portable radios, ship-to-shore radios, monitoring short wave broadcasts, and television. Hubbard was naturally fascinated by his father's pioneering TV efforts — he bought the first RCA television camera ever sold and, in the summer of 1938, he held the first demonstration of television in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. A decade later, the senior Hubbard established KSTP-TV, the upper Midwest's first commercial television station and today's only locally owned and operated broadcasting company in the Twin Cities.
After his graduation from the Breck Military School in 1951, Hubbard officially became an employee of KSTP-TV, starting in the station's telephoto department. He worked his way through the ranks while earning a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Soon after graduating in 1955, Hubbard became KSTP's vice president.
In 1967 Hubbard became president of Hubbard Broadcasting. A year later, the company built WTOG-TV, Channel 44, in St. Petersburg, Florida, arguably the first successful UHF independent station to operate in a VHF market.
In 1981, Hubbard started USSB (United States Satellite Broadcasting Company) to create a new satellite TV business. Three years later, after Hubbard was named Hubbard Broadcasting chairman and CEO, the company built and proved the feasibility of the first satellite news gathering vehicles, the design of which would become standard. The first unit, Model GT/AC, is on display at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.
In 1987, Hubbard and his son, Stanley E. Hubbard II, and Ray Conover, as chief engineer, established the first satellite news gathering company, Conus Communications, and became the first broadcaster to own a Ku-band transponder. At its height, Conus serviced more than 150 television stations around the world.
In 1991, USSB, in partnership with Hughes Aircraft, launched the first high powered direct broadcast satellite. Three years later, both USSB and DirecTV initiated the first direct-to-consumer satellite TV broadcasting and started competing with cable for customers.
Within a year, satellite TV had more than half a million subscribers, while USSB had about 300,000 subscribers. In 1996, USSB earned $224.1 million in its initial public offering. In January 1999, DirecTV and USSB merged in a deal reportedly worth $1.3 billion.
In recognition of his contributions to both broadcasting and his pioneering effort in the satellite TV business, Hubbard and his late father were given the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Broadcasters in 1995.
While running both Hubbard Broadcasting and USSB, Hubbard served on the FCC's Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service to develop HDTV, and on the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, which helped develop policies and plans for America's new information and telecommunications infrastructure.
Hubbard was an inductee in Broadcasting & Cable magazine's first Hall of Fame in 1991, the Society of Satellite Professionals International Hall of Fame in 1992, a recipient of the SBCA's Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994, and the Dealerscope Hall of Fame in 1996. He married Karen Elizabeth Holmen in 1959, and has five children. Of Hubbard's 15 grandchildren, the three oldest are already active in Hubbard Broadcasting, carrying on the family legacy.
Inventor, Flash Memory
Each time you slide a flash memory card into a digital camera, or a thumb drive into a USB jack, sync your music to a digital music player, or store data on a tablet PC, thank Dr. Fujio Masuoka, who invented flash memory.
Masuoka was born May 8, 1943, in Takasaki City, Gunma, Japan. When he was 10, his mother encouraged him to study mathematics and hired a private teacher. By the time he was 12, Masuoka had mastered advanced mathematics. In high school, Masuoka concentrated on theory, believing that advances in technology or electronics were achieved only through theoretical work. As a result of his studies, Masuoka also developed a deep understanding of economics and law.
He received his Bachelor of Science, Masters of Science and PhD in electrical engineering from Tohoku University in 1966, 1968 and 1971, respectively. Soon after graduating, Masuoka joined Toshiba Research and Development Center in April 1971.
Three months into his new job, Masuoka's boss, Dr. Yoshiyuki Takeishi, showed Masuoka Intel's Ultraviolet Erasable Electrically Programmable Read Only Memory (UV EEPROM), which was announced a few months earlier. Masuoka studied the Intel technology for two months and discovered a new structure, a stacked gate avalanche injection type MOS read-only memory (SAMOS), which became Masuoka's first patent in 1972.
Between 1972 and 1984, Masuoka made other significant memory breakthroughs, pairing a dynamic memory cell with a double poly-silicon structure. In 1977, he moved to Toshiba's semiconductor division, where he developed 1 Mbit DRAM.
Masuoka later transitioned to Toshiba's memory product engineering division in 1980 to begin his work on developing flash memory. He then shifted to Toshiba's memory design engineering division in 1984, where he perfected and patented NOR flash memory. He presented his findings at the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco. A year later, he progressed to 256 Kbit flash memory.
In April 1987, Masuoka returned to the Toshiba research and development center, where he began to successfully develop more advanced NAND-type flash memory. Despite his breakthroughs, flash was not yet ready for commercialization. What slowed Masuoka down was not technology, but money.
In order to create and manufacture a commercial pre-fabricated 4 Mbit flash memory chip, Masuoka needed to develop a mask to serve as a high-tech stencil to project the various circuit patterns on each layer of a microprocessor. But the cost estimate to create a mask was 10 million yen, which Toshiba was initially unwilling to invest. Masuoka convinced Toshiba's consumer electronics research executives that a 4 Mbit flash memory chip could be used to create a consumer-ready digital camera with the flash memory serving as "digital film." With funding from the consumer electronics division, Masuoka continued his development and presented the 4 Mbit NAND-type flash memory at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in New York City in 1989.
In 1994, Masuoka joined Tohoku University where he was a professor for 13 years before being appointed Professor Emeritus of the university's Research Institute of Electrical Communication.
For his pioneering work on flash memory, Masuoka has been presented with numerous honors and awards in Japan including the inaugural Watanabe Prize in 1977 and the National Invention Award in 1980. In 2007, Masuoka was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon from Emperor Akihito.
Founder & Inventor of Ethernet
It looks like an oversized phone jack, but the now-familiar Ethernet jack and the computers and Internet network that it links us to, was the creation of Bob Metcalfe.
A native New Yorker, Metcalfe was born on April 7, 1946, to Robert I. Metcalfe, an aerospace technician, and Ruth, a high school secretary. His father helped him build model trains in their basement and, while in the fourth grade, presciently wrote that his son would one day earn a degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
For his eighth grade science project, Metcalfe cannibalized switches, relays and neon lights from his model trains and built a neo-computer that could add any number between one and three to any number between one and three to yield their sum between two and six, for which he received a memorable "A+++ H Superior."
Metcalfe's father co-founded BAM Electronics, which repaired televisions. Metcalfe senior arrived home one day to find his son unconscious in the basement among some of his broken TVs. The youngster had reached inside the back of a set and grabbed the high-voltage cable leading into the cathode ray tube (CRT). After that, Metcalfe stuck to voltages below 5V.
Metcalfe did indeed attend MIT. As an undergraduate, he worked for Raytheon, programming submarine target computers and design automation for the Air Force's Cambridge Research Lab. He earned his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1969, along with a B.S. in industrial management.
Metcalfe transitioned to Harvard for his post-graduate degrees. When the university refused to let him connect the school's computers to the brand new network created by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), he joined MIT's Project MAC to help engineer ARPANET hardware and software, and link MIT's computers to the fledgling Internet.
He earned his master's in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1970 and his PhD about packet communication and ARPANET in 1973.
While working toward his PhD, Metcalfe went to work for ARPA at MIT. Metcalfe then moved west to work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where many of today's familiar computer technologies such as the graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse were created.
On May 22, 1973, Metcalfe circulated "Alto Ethernet" memo, which included a rough schematic of how a new local network would work, recognizing antecedents such as the Alohanet at the University of Hawaii.
On November 11, the co-inventors of Ethernet — Metcalfe along with David R. Boggs — successfully demonstrated the first Ethernet system. They went on to connect the far-flung offices of Xerox Corp. In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com Corp, short for "computer, communication and compatibility," to develop standard hardware and software products for the Internet, based on three proposed standards: Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Unix. 3Com went public in 1984 and Metcalfe retired in 1990.
Metcalfe spent the next decade as a publisher and pundit. He served as CEO of IDG's InfoWorld Publishing Company from 1992 to 1995, and as IDG's vice president of technology from 1995 to 2000. For eight years, he wrote a syndicated Internet column for InfoWorld. He spoke at conferences, on radio and television, hosted a weekly webcast, and was executive producer of industry events including ACM97, ACM1, Agenda, PopTech and Vortex. He also authored several books including Packet Communication, Internet Collapses and Beyond Calculation.
Metcalfe collected numerous honorary degrees, honors and tributes from the computer industry, beginning with the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1980. In 1988, he received the IEEE Bell Medal and later earned the IEEE's Medal of Honor. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997, and, in 1999, to the International Engineering Consortium. In 2003, Metcalfe received the Marconi Prize, and in 2005, he received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush. Metcalfe was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007 and Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows in 2008.
In 2001, Metcalfe became a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners, serving on the boards of a number of Polaris-backed start-ups and as a director-trustee-advisor to Avistar Communications, USC Stevens and MIT. He also worked with MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, Department of Chemistry, Department of Mathematics and Deans of Engineering and Science.
In January 2011, Metcalfe joined The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering, where he is now Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise.
Runco International
Sam Runco's name is literally synonymous with home theater — he actually trademarked the term in California, and his namesake company, Runco International, became the most innovative and highly respected projection television makers in the world.
Born into a coal mining family in Scranton, Penn., Runco devoured monthly issues of Popular Mechanics, Mechanics Illustrated andPopular Science, and spent his spare time tinkering. He even built a number of models of the futuristic products featured in these magazines.
Runco also was greatly influenced by Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, especially by Carnegie's belief that developing the ability to speak in front of people was a shortcut to distinction.
Runco never made it to college. Instead, in his early twenties, he took a job with a motivational training company. Runco traveled around the country to Michigan, Seattle, and then to San Francisco, where he ended up in the walk-in cooler business.
He soon discovered he not only had technical aptitudes, but also could cogently explain the technical aspects of products, a combination of skills that soon came in handy. At age 22, Runco was fiddling with a Fresnel lens in front of a 13-inch television, and was able to project a faint six-foot picture onto a sheet pinned to the wall. He was hooked. Runco continued to refine his big-screen concept until he achieved what he felt was "a good picture."
Runco began to make and sell projection television kits to local bars and via mail order. By the late 1980s, as the home theater concept gained traction, Runco was well ahead of the curve. He and his wife, Lori, formed his eponymous company in 1986; two years later, the company received a California trademark on the phrase "home theater."
Working from their garage in Foster City, CA, Sam and Lori shipped projectors one at a time until they could ship two. In the next few years, as the company grew, Runco made two technical innovations that gained Runco an almost cult following in the exploding home theater scene.
In 1991, he introduced the first projector with a built-in line doubler, the Super IDTV (improved definition television) system, which consisted of the IDP-800 projector mated to the SC-1050 line doubler. Then Runco hit upon what would become both a legendary product and an enduring concept: the ARC-IV aspect-ratio controller, which allowed users to switch from standard television's 4:3 aspect ratio, to the theatrical formats of 2.35:1, 1.85:1 and to the anamorphic widescreen ratio of 16:9, which became the HDTV format. This allowed Runco International to deliver HDTV-capable products seven years prior to the adoption of HDTV.
In 1997, Runco improved the successor to the Super IDTV by designing and building the high-definition DTV-852, the first CRT projector with a built-in line doubler. He also developed the first nine-inch cathode-ray tubes in a consumer projector, the first corner convergence controls, and the first application of digital light processing (DLP) for home theater.
Runco also has been very active in promoting the interests of the CE industry. He served on CEA's Board of Industry Leaders from 2003 to 2008 and was a member of the CEA Video Division. He served as a director of Focus Enhancements Inc. from August 2004 to September 2008.
By the time he sold his company to Planar in 2007 for $36.7 million, Runco International recorded net annual sales of $54.6 million.
Runco and his wife still live in the San Francisco bay area, and have three children, Sarah, Sammy and Nick.
Inventor, Digital Data Communications
Who would have thought that a series of 1s and 0s could be used to create and transmit words, pictures or video? Claude Shannon did. His 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," created the foundation for the entire digital data communications revolution and is considered the Magna Carta of the information age.
Claude Elwood Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan, on April 30, 1916. As a boy, Shannon excelled at science and mathematics. At home, he constructed model planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a telegraph system to a friend's house half a mile away ingeniously using two barbed wires around a nearby pasture. He earned spending money from a paper route and from delivering telegrams, as well as from repairing radios for a local department store. His childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin.
After earning Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1936, Shannon became a research assistant in MIT's electrical engineering department. There he was one of four assistants who operated the Bush differential analyzer, the era's most advanced calculating machine.
While studying how the analyzer operated, Shannon became interested in the theory and design, and determined that symbolic logic and Boolean algebra could be used in the analysis and synthesis of switching and computer circuits. He further developed these theories during the summer of 1937 at Bell Labs in New York City, and while writing his master's thesis at MIT.
Shannon's thesis was awarded the Alfred Noble Prize of the combined engineering societies of the United States in 1940, and was later called "one of the most important master's theses ever written – a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science."
In September 1938, at the suggestion of the eminent electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, who later organized the Manhattan Project, Shannon switched from MIT's electrical engineering department to the mathematics department. He spent the summer of 1939 at the Carnegie Institute's Cold Spring Harbor branch working on his doctoral dissertation, "An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics." In the spring of 1940, Shannon received a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and his PhD in mathematics.
On a National Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton the following academic year, Shannon began to work on his ideas relating to information theory and efficient communication systems.
With America's entry into World War II, Shannon returned to Bell Labs and joined a team working on anti-aircraft directors. During the next 15 years at Bell Labs, Shannon worked in many areas, most notably in information theory. In 1948, he published his first foundational treatise on information theory, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which demonstrated that all information sources — including telegraph keys, people speaking, and television cameras — have an associated "source rate" that can be measured in bits per second.
"Few other works of this century have had greater impact on science and engineering," it was later noted. "By this landmark paper and his several subsequent papers on information theory he has altered most profoundly all aspects of communication theory and practice."
Shannon published other foundational work and papers including a paper on cryptography which led to his appointment as a consultant on cryptographic matters to the U.S. government.
While at Bell Labs, Shannon met Mary Elizabeth (Betty) Moore, whom he married in 1949. She combined her interests in hand weaving and computing to pioneer work in computer-controlled looms in the 1960s.
Shannon became a permanent member of the MIT faculty and also continued his affiliation with Bell Telephone Laboratories until July 1972. He received a host of honorary degrees, fellowships and scientific awards including the National Medal of Science from President Johnson in 1966. He was also a member of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the board of directors of Teledyne, Inc.
Shannon's seminal work, equated with Einstein's, was far ahead of its time. It was not until the early 1970s and the advent of high-speed integrated circuits did engineers begin fully to exploit Shannon's work. His insights help shape virtually all systems that store, process or transmit information in digital form, from CDs to computers, in every field of communications, commerce, art and science.
Andrew Viterbi's eponymous algorithm for signal interference suppression made a major impression on digital cellular and satellite technology, and has helped to give us crystal clear cell phone calls and satellite television images.
Born in Bergamo, Italy, on March 9, 1935, Viterbi's family fled the Fascist regime to escape the persecution of Jews in 1939. The Viterbi's settled first in New York City, and then moved to Boston where Viterbi attended the renowned Boston Latin School.
Long absences from family members back in Italy instilled the young Viterbi with a desire to find ways of communicating across political and geographical borders. By the time he went to college, Viterbi knew he wanted to become an engineer, influenced by the proximity of his home to MIT.
He earned a scholarship to MIT in 1952, where he was introduced to statistical communications theory. There he encounterd many renowned scholars, including CEA's 2011 Hall of Fame inductee Claude Shannon. In 1956, he met and married Erna Finci; a year later, he graduated from MIT with both Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees.
Three months after Viterbi joined the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Russian satellite Sputnik was launched. JPL got a contract from the Army to put up a small satellite. Viterbi was a junior member of the team that provided telemetry for the first successful U.S. satellite program, Explorer I. Viterbi specialized in "spread spectrum" as a way to quickly and accurately process and transmit information packets, overcoming the satellite's weak signal and frequency changes created by rapid orbits. He was one of the first scientists to propose digital transmission techniques for satellite telecommunications.
While working at JPL in 1962, Viterbi earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. A year later he began teaching courses in digital communications and information theory at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. There he created an algorithm, now known as the Viterbi Algorithm, which he described as a quick method of eliminating dead ends in the communication stream.
There was only one problem. At the time, only a handful of computers in the world could perform the millions of operation


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How to fit the website width to the screen width without stretching width on zoomout
I am looking to make something like this website: http://ca.com please try to zoom out and see the website will not stretch on left and right.
Would appreciate your kind hints.
Note: I don't want to use the Jquery or any library, just pure Javascript or CSS.

subset: commoncrawl


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In this instrutable I am going to show you a few methods of cleaning a laptop screen with household products you probably already have. It is cheep and safe way to make your monitor shine like its brand new!!
Step 1: Gather Materials
- Cloth-Make sure that it is clean, soft, and lint-free cloth. You can't use most paper towels because most have very small pieces of wood in them which will scratch screen.
- Water- I Justed tap water
You can use camera polishing cloth or eye glasses polishing cloth to polish the screen after you have cleaned it.
Step 2: Clean the Screen
,Optional Step- Now get a piece of eye glass polishing cloth or camera polishing cloth and polish the screen.,
I hope this helps you. If you have any questions please comment.


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Great photo, props to the photographer...and the climber.
Very cool picture!
Awesome photo! I love the angle that you took it from - I had to think twice before I could picture how you were shooting.
Great pic yes, but no gear in the crack?? It's easy to slot a bomber nut near her left hand and not have to trust an inverted cam slotted behind a flake...yikes!
Over the years (decades), this move has gotten more and more slippery---please take care to protect this; if you don't, you may take a nasty digger into the road.


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Find of the Week: CoverMate Food Covers
September 16, 2010 at 3:05 pm , by Megan Weiss
Whenever I see new inventions, especially one as simple as CoverMate's Food Covers, my initial reaction is anger—why didn't I think of that! I have an entire drawer of mismatched containers and lids and never seem to be able to find the corresponding matches. I am then left to resort to plastic wrap, which usually takes me a few tries to actually get it to stay on the container and not stick to itself.
This new product resembling a hotel shower cap eliminates all of that. There are so many benefits to using this product aside from giving you some extra cupboard space
- Keeps food fresh: They are twice as thick as plastic wrap and hold a tight seal to lock in the freshness.
- Easy to re-use: The food covers are reusable, waterproof, dishwasher safe, and microwave safe.
- Fits any shape: CoverMate conveniently makes 3 sizes that fit anything from a small soup can to a large party platter.
- Easy for entertaining: Another benefit of the food covers that can help with entertaining outdoors is that they keep food fresh and prevent bugs from getting in.
The Cover Mate Food Covers are environmentally friendly and free of BPA, PVC, and latex. So stop tearing apart your kitchen looking for matching container lids and easily keep your food fresh with CoverMate Food Covers. (3.99)
Categories: Food, Ladies' Lounge | Tags: CoverMate, food containers, Food storage | No Comments


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… to the fisker. Yes, "Sir" Bob Geldof who wanks higher than any in Wome. Read this…
Bob Geldof has claimed that the Earth as we know it could end by 2030 thanks to the ravages of climate change.
That's actually quite unfiskable in the sense that I don't want (if I am spared to be living in 2013 seventeen years hence – I want my jet-pack!). Anyway the Boomtown Prat proceeds…
The campaigner [for whom?] and former Boomtown Rats singer said the human race could soon be extinct at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg.
"The world can decide in a fit of madness to kill itself," he said, according to the Telegraph. "Sometimes progress may not be possible."
Well, it certainly wasn't in his musical career. He could have been a veritable Chesney Hawkes and wasn't it Midge Ure who wrote that song anyway?
"We're in a very fraught time," he continued, warning the 8,000 international delegates: "There will be a mass extinction event. That could happen on your watch. The signs are that it will happen and soon."
You can't make this up. Anyway how old are his kids? Like that one who fronted a show on Islam without even having read the Qu'ran? Was that Peaches?
The conference – a networking and debate event for young people from 190 countries – featured speeches from high profile 'counsellors'. Former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan and business mogul Richard Branson also took to the stage, but none appeared to match Mr Geldof for urgency.
Is his prostate playing up? But more to the point isn't telling "young people" they basically have no future nasty? This from the guy that apparently worked so hard for Ethiopia's future?
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die.
- From the only Boomtown Rats song anyone recalls.
There was more guff but I'll give Bob the penultimate words…
Departing the stage, he apologised for being "bloody miserable" and told delegates to "just get on with it".
What horrifying nonsense is this? I have a tremendous hope for the future. I shall probs live to see things from SF novels I read as a kid. How dare "Sir" Bob tell kids, "Sometimes progress may not be possible". Get them a Raspberry Pi and see what fools they make of pontificating old geezers like Bob and Dave! Gods almighty they are misanthropic old sods are they not?
Let's just build Skylon and stick 'em in eternal LEO! Way too much political discourse is undertaken at the level of a Smith's album after Johnnie Marr had just run over Mozzer's cat. It is dismal. Utter professional miserablism.
And I was only on the Indy to look-up a recipe for cod and parma ham and now I don't like Mondays and Heaven knows I'm miserable now.


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Tour: High Line Design with James Corner Field Operations
Tour: High Line Design with James Corner Field Operations
The High Line's design was created by a visionary team led by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf.
Join landscape architect Elizabeth Fain LaBombard, an associate at James Corner Field Operations, on a walking tour to learn about the High Line project, from concept through execution. Elizabeth will discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by the elevated steel structure when designing and installing the landscape on the High Line.
This High Line Program is open to visitors of all ages. Tickets are $15, or $10 for members of Friends of the High Line.LOCATION
The meeting location will be provided in the confirmation email following your ticket purchase. PURCHASE TICKETS.
Stay for dinner and dessert after your walking tour. On the High Line between West 15th and West 16th Street you will find tacos, gelato, ice pops, and more seasonal treats from our food vendors, as well as Terroir at The Porch, a full-service, open-air café serving beer, wine, and small plates with sweeping views of the Hudson River. Learn more.
About Elizabeth Fain LaBombard
Elizabeth Fain LaBombard holds a Bachelor Degree in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia and a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Prior to joining James Corner Field Operations, she researched landscape urbanization processes as part of the continued investigation of Professor Alan Berger from MIT, culminating in the 2006 publication Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. She has also worked as an intern for Mia Lehrer & Associates and Johnson Fain in Los Angeles, Ca.
This walking tour is presented by Friends of the High Line. Sign up for the High Line E-News to get news updates, special invitations, and more from Friends of the High Line.