Last Saturday, Tracy Carcione posted that sad article about Dr. James Bliss illness and his work in developing the optacon. This prompted me to do a little webcrawling to see if I could find anything on John G. Linvill, the other inventor of the optacon. I found his obituary, which I'll paste here.
I have a personal comment first.My mom and I watched a news program in 1971, I believe it was. There was a feature showing Dr. Linvill with his daughter, Candy. He talked about the optacon and then it showed Candy reading with it. Oh, I thought that was the coolest thing. I longed to have one, but it was much to expensive for us. I put it in the back of my mind until I had the opportunity to go for training in 1981. I sometimes refer to my optacon as my "electronic sight", because, when I flip the switch, I can not only read straight print, but bould much rather read a table with the optacon that after it has been scanned because of formatting issues, and I can figure out simple diagrams and occasionally the simplest of pictures such as a menorah or virtical antenna for ham radio.
Enough from me. Here's the obituary.
Debby
Stanford Report, March 10, 2011
Stanford engineering professor and inventor John G. Linvill dies at 91
A pioneer of Silicon Valley, John Linvill
"transistorized" the Stanford electrical
engineering curriculum and helped shape an industry that shaped the world.
Chuck Painter
John Linvill with his daughter, Candy, working on the Optacon
John Linvill invented the optical-to-tactile
converter, or Optacon, as a means to allow his
blind daughter, Candy, to read ordinary print.
BY ANDREW MYERS
John Linvill, professor emeritus of electrical
engineering at Stanford and inventor of the
Optacon reading device for the blind, has died. He was 91.
Linvill was a revered figure at Stanford as much
for his self-effacing and unpretentious style as
for his engineering foresight and his commitment to the
entrepreneurial spirit. He chaired the Department
of Electrical Engineering from 1964 to 1980 and
was a seminal figure in the School of Engineering during
the 1960s and '70s heyday that fed well-trained
electrical engineers to an eager and growing Silicon Valley.
Born and raised in Missouri, Linvill received a
bachelor's degree in mathematics from William
Jewell College in 1941 before enrolling at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he earned his
bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in
electrical engineering. After two years as an assistant professor
at MIT, Linvill joined Bell Labs, doing research
on transistor circuit design problems.
Linvill was content at Bell Labs, but in 1954,
Stanford Engineering Dean Fred Terman came
calling. Terman had in hand an unexpected gift from Sid Gilfillan,
who expressed an interest in bringing someone to
Stanford to build a program in the application of
transistors. Terman's search led him to Linvill, who
had earned a reputation as a proven and popular
teacher while at MIT and an outstanding scholar
in research in transistor circuits.
In 1955, Linvill became Stanford's first
appointment in a discipline that helped to shape
an industry that in turn shaped the world. While the trajectory
of Stanford's program began with transistor
circuit design, it took a dramatic turn in 1956
with the arrival of William Shockley in Palo Alto, the heart
what is now Silicon Valley.
A shrewd judge of talent
During Linvill's career in the Department of
Electrical Engineering, he repeatedly exhibited
an intuitive understanding of transformative moments in research.
He was able to see a breakthrough, to imagine its
potential importance and to set in motion the
wheels to make sure that Stanford led, always. He was a
shrewd judge of his own talents and strengths,
and an even shrewder judge of talent in others he
wanted to join Stanford to realize the rare opportunity
being presented to those with an entrepreneurial bent.
John Linvill
John Linvill
It was this quality that led Linvill to
contemplate the sort of academic preparation that
would best suit electrical engineering students intent on joining
the nascent semiconductor industry. Linvill had
to decide whether Stanford students would be
better served by a curriculum in traditional circuit design
or one that included a strong component of
semiconductor device physics and fabrication.
Characteristically, Linvill tested his hypotheses
on people of insight. In the fall of 1956 ? the
year William Shockley shared the Nobel Prize for the invention
of the transistor ? Linvill realized that he,
Terman and Shockley held a similar view: that
Silicon Valley would most need electrical engineers skilled
in the art of semiconductor device design and fabrication.
Early conversations among the inventors led to a
proposal in which Stanford would establish a
laboratory where electrical engineering students could research
semiconductor devices. But semiconductor
fabrication was not yet part of any university
curriculum and was, in some circles, considered dangerous for students.
Shockley believed the young professionals in his
company were models for a new sort of engineer,
and he agreed to provide the training necessary for Stanford
to build a device fabrication laboratory.
Stanford, in turn, would place a faculty member
in Shockley's firm to learn the technology.
Linvill's next move was to persuade Jim Gibbons,
one of his former PhD students and a future dean
of engineering, to accept a 50-50 appointment at Stanford
and at Shockley Semiconductor. Linvill's charge
for Gibbons was to set up the lab and help him
initiate a research curriculum at Stanford. Lab construction
began on Aug. 1, 1957. Just six weeks later, on
Sept. 19, Shockley's model young professionals
left his firm en masse to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
By then, however, the embryonic Stanford lab was
under way, and by March 1958, working with just a
student and a technician, Gibbons had succeeded in producing
Stanford's first semiconductor device, a year ahead of schedule.
The first step in Linvill's vision for
solid-state electronics at Stanford was complete.
In quick succession he brought on Gerald Pearson, a talented Bell
Labs researcher and a co-inventor of the silicon
photovoltaic cell, and John Moll, an established
expert in the physics of transistor operation and co-inventor
of the MOS transistor. Together with Linvill and
Gibbons, they created Stanford's first program in
graduate research and education in solid-state devices.
Soon, Bill Spicer, Jim Angell and, later, Robert
White would enrich Stanford's faculty. In just a
few short years, Linvill had assembled the core of Stanford's
storied Solid State Laboratory, progenitor of
several important electrical engineering laboratories at Stanford.
Later, Linvill would entice and mentor integrated
circuit pioneers Jim Meindl, founder of
Stanford's Integrated Circuits Laboratory; John Hennessy, founder
of MIPS and now president of Stanford; Jim Clark,
the founder of Silicon Graphics; and Jim Plummer,
current dean of the School of Engineering. Many of
these early hires and large numbers of students remained lifelong friends.
Invented device to help blind people read
Linvill reveled in his role of mentor. He was
genuinely interested in the success of others,
especially entrepreneurial success. Linvill applied his engineering
creativity and his entrepreneurial spirit to help
his daughter, Candy, who became blind in infancy.
Linvill sought a way to help her to directly read printed
materials without translation into Braille. His
solution, using integrated circuits developed in
the labs and with the help of colleagues at Stanford and
the Stanford Research Institute, was the Optacon
(optical-to-tactile converter). The Optacon was a
portable device with a small, hand-held camera that
could be moved across any type of printed
material to generate images on a fingertip-sized
tactile display that were then felt and interpreted by a blind
reader.
Linvill received a patent for the Optacon in
1966. He was a co-founder in 1970 of Telesensory
Systems Inc., a company established to manufacture and disseminate
the Optacon worldwide. The Optacon was to become
one of the most important examples of how
technology could be applied to the development of assistive
devices for people with disabilities. In 1971,
Industrial Research Inc. named the Optacon one of
the 100 most significant products of the year. Helped
greatly by her father's invention, Candy attended
Stanford and went on to earn her doctorate in clinical psychology.
The late 1970s demanded a new era of innovation
in Stanford's electrical engineering curriculum.
The advent of the microprocessor at Intel introduced electronic
hardware controlled by software programs
integrated in the system. Linvill and colleagues
foresaw that optimum system design would soon require the creation
of hardware and software designed for specific
applications ? computer graphics, for example ?
and that groundbreaking research would require an effective
partnership between electrical engineering and
computer science. The result was Stanford's
Center for Integrated Systems (CIS).
Linvill and CIS colleagues anticipated, as well,
that with the proper openness, integrated systems
research would profit by engaging with forward-looking
electronics companies. As co-director of CIS,
Linvill conceived and implemented a visitors
program in CIS to bring industry professionals to Stanford and
the Fellow/Mentor/Advisor (FMA) program that
placed Stanford doctoral candidates in industry
for a portion of their education. More than 30 years later,
CIS has become the model for university-corporate partnerships.
In 2007, at a special celebration surrounded by
his family, Linvill was surprised by a group of
former students, colleagues and friends who had endowed
the Professor John G. Linvill Fellowship Fund,
which supports the education of an outstanding
graduate student in electrical engineering. Many of those
contributors had flown in from across the country
to toast their friend and mentor.
In addition to serving as chair of the Department
of Electrical Engineering, Linvill was associate
dean of the School of Engineering from 1972 to 1980,
and was the Canon USA Professor of Electrical
Engineering from its endowment in 1989 until his
retirement at the end of 1990. As a professor emeritus,
Linvill continued to follow his passions,
focusing research on integrated systems.
Linvill was named a fellow of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1960 and
was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1971
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
1974. He received the IEEE Education Medal in
1976 and the John Scott Award in 1980 for his work on the
Optacon.
Linvill was honored with the American Electronics
Association's Medal of Achievement in 1983 for
his significant contributions to the advancement of electronics.
He was recipient of the Louis Braille Prize
(1984) from the Deutscher Blindenverband for the invention of the Optacon.
John Grimes Linvill was born on Aug. 8, 1919, in
Kansas City, Mo. His twin brother, William, also
a Stanford professor, died in 1980. He is survived by
his wife, Marjorie Linvill, of Palo Alto; a son,
Greg (Betty), of Belmont, Calif.; a daughter,
Candy Berg (Chris), of Portola Valley, Calif.; two granddaughters,
Angela and Alyssa Linvill; and a great grandson, Sato Ramsaran.
A service celebrating Linvill's life will be held
at the Stanford Faculty Club on May 23 from 3:30
to 5:30 p.m. The family asks that donations in memory
of John G. Linvill be made to the LMSarcoma
Direct Research Foundation in Tulsa, Okla. (
www.lmsdr.org).
Andrew Myers is associate director of
communications at the School of Engineering.
DAILY NEWS EMAIL
MEDIA CONTACT
Adam Gorlick, Stanford News Service:
(650) 725-0224
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