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ALBERT ROSE
1910-1990
BY PAUL K. WEIMER
ALBERT ROSE an eminent research physicist and pioneer in
the development of electronic imaging, died on July 26, 1990, at
the age of eighty.
Born in New York City in 1910, Al received his A.B. from
CornellUniversityin 1931 andhisPh.D. in 1935. Soon thereafter
Rejoined the technical staffofthe Radio Corporation of America
(RCA) and spent most of his career as a research fellow at the
RCA David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey.
Al's contributions to science and engineering were widely recog-
nized, leading to his election to the National Academy of Engi-
neering in 1975.
The development of television was already a major objective
atRCAwhenA1joined the companyin 1935. His first assignment
was to design a new television camera with greatly improved
sensitivity. At that time an optical image of the scene to be
transmitted was focused on a light-sensitive "camera tube" such
as an iconoscope that generated the vicleo signal by scanning the
image with a high-energy electron beam. Unfortunately, the
secondary electrons produced by the high-velocity beam tended
to degrade the charge pattern and diminish the signal. Al's first
important advance in camera tubes was the use of a "low-velocity"
scanning beam that eliminated the redistribution of secondary
electrons. The resulting new tube, which was developed in
collaboration with Harley Tams, was called an orthicon. It
197
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
provided several times higher sensitivity than the iconoscope
and better picture quality.
Al's second major innovation, just before World War II, was his
invention of the "two-sided thin-glass target," which permitted
the construction of a much improved camera tube to be known
as the image orthicon. The image orthicon was developed with
colleagues H. B. Law and P. K. Weimer for military purposes
during the war, and it served for twenty years after the war for
most television broadcasting. Its sensitivity exceeded that of its
predecessors by a hundred times, permitting television pickup
under very adverse lighting conditions.
Concurrently with the above work, A1 began to examine the
fundamental performance limitations of other types of image
sensors, including photographic film and the human eye. He
showed that the number of photons required to detect an image
of a given contrast and resolution could be calculated for an
ideal image sensor whose quantum efficiency was known. Publi-
cation of this work in the early 1940s received considerable
attention. Itwas summarized again later in Al's book titled Vision:
Human and Electronic, published by Plenum Press in 1973.
The complexity of the image orthicon and the rather low
quantum efficiency of its photocathode suggested the desirabil-
ity of a camera tube based on photoconductivity rather than
photoemission. In 1948 A1 initiated an investigation at RCA that
resulted in the development of the first photoconductive cam-
era tubes of the now well-known vidicon type. At about the same
time, he began a reexamination of the nature of photoconduc-
tivity in a series of papers that presented its basic mechanism as
we now understand it. He showed the dependence of its gain-
bandwidth product (its figure of merit for devices) on the nature
of the contacts to the photoconductor and on the internal
ct~str~out~on ot its traps and recombination centers. This work
1. . .. .. ~ ..
was summarized later in his book titled Concepts in Photoconduc-
tivity and Allied Problems, published byJohn Wiley and Sons in
1963.
Although A1 never sought a position in research manage-
ment, RCA asked him in 1955 to direct the establishment of an
RCA Laboratories research branch in Zurich, Switzerland. Al's
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ALBERT ROSE
199
prestige as a scientist and his stimulating personality attracted
talented young applicants and helped establish an immediate
rapport with other European laboratories.
Upon returning to the Sarnoff Research Center in 1957, A1
joined the solid-state physics group, where his superb grasp of
fundamental physics and electronics was most valuable. His
approach to problems and the warm regard of his colleagues
were perfectly expressed by M. A. Lampert and P. Mark in the
dedication of their book Current Injection in Solids: "To Albert
Rose, who chose simplicity over precision, and thereby gave to all
of us insight." Although A1 published more than seventy papers,
he always had time to help and advise younger colleagues.
For many years A1 served as an associate editor of Physical
Review and of Advances in Electronics, and he was on the editorial
board of the Internationaliournal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids.
He also served on the organizing committees of many interna-
tional conferences on subjects such as photoconductivit,v, semi-
conductors, surfaces, electrophotography, and electronic imag-
ing.
Upon his retirement from RCA in 1975, A1 was appointed a
Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of
Technology, and in later years he was a visiting professor at
Stanford University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and several
other schools. After returning to Princeton in 1981, he worked
as a visiting scientist at the Exxon Laboratories and later at the
Chronar Corporation. He also supervised the republication of a
collection of his later papers as a book titled Electron-Phonon
Interactions, published by World Scientific in 1990. He continual
to participate in technical conferences on electronic imaging
and to present the Albert Rose Electronic Imager of the Year
Award that had been created in his honor in 1986 by the Institute
for Graphic Communications.
Al's work resulted in many awards. He was a fellow of the
American Physical Society and of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a member of the Societe
Suisse de Physique and Phi Beta Kappa. Other honors included
the Morris N. Liebmann Award of the Institute of Radio Engi-
neers (now IEEE) (1945~; corecipient of the Television Broad-
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
casters Award ~ 1945~; the journal Award of the Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers (1946~; the David Sarnoff
Gold Medal Award of the Society of Motion Picture and Televi-
sion Engineers (1958~; election to the National Academy of
Engineering (1975~; the Edison Medal of the IEEE (1979~; an
honorary doctoral degree from the Rochester Institute for
Technology (1989~; and, posthumously, a Pioneer Induction to
the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame (1991) .
As a strong advocate for the use of solar energy for power
generation, Al received the Leo Friend Award for his paper titled
"Solar Energy: A Global View, " published in the Chemtechjournal
of the American Chemical Society (1981~. This unexpected
tribute from another discipline shows the breadth of vision of
this creative and concerned humanist.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
motion picture
