[Boatanchors] 1942 RCA film about tubes and TV

[JAMES HANLON]

One of the gentlemen shown early in the RCA film in coat and tie doing RF work on penicillin was Dr. George Harold Brown.  I went to school, Ohio State Electrical Engineering, BS class of 1961, with his son, George Junior.  Dr Brown was a full-time RCA employee and wound up the VP in charge of the Princeton lab when I knew him.  His primary expertise was in antennas.  He did the early work in two-element phased array beams that led my Ohio State Electromagnetics Professor, John Kraus, W8JK, to develop the beam we know as the 8JK.  Dr Brown also invented the turnstile antenna, omnidirectional horizontal polarized, that was used by broadcast TV stations for many years, and he did the definitive study on Ground Plane Radials that we still depend upon.  F. E. Terman in his classic, Radio Engineers Handbook, 1943, cites Brown's work 19 times.  The only person to have more citations is Terman himself with 43.  Brown is cited for "Water Cooled Resistors for Ultrahigh Frequencies, Vertical and Horizontal Polarization, Directional Antennas (five times), Tower Antennas for Broadcast Use, A Critical Study of the Characteristics of Broadcast Antennas as Affected by Antenna Current Distributions (three times),  Beam Transmission of Ultra-Short Waves, Turnstile Antennas, A Consideration of the Radio Frequency Voltages Encountered by the Insulating Material of Broadcast Tower Antennas (twice), Ground Systems as a Factor in Antenna Efficiency, The Phase and Magnitude of Earth Currents Near Radio Transmitting Antennas, and An Ultra-High Frequency Antenna of Simple Construction."

I'll quickly tell a couple of stories about Dr. Brown.

He gave a talk to Engineers Day at Ohio State in 1960 or 61, and one thing he said to us was to compare Engineers and Physicists. "Physicists are to Engineers like Thermometers are to Thermostats."

The second story was told to me by his son.  When RCA was developing Color TV at the Princeton Lab, they were in competition with GE (I think).  The FCC had already given approval to GE which used a frame-sequential system and a spinning wheel with three color filters in front of a Black-and-White CRT.  The GE system produced a beautiful picture, but it was not compatible with the Black-and-White TV system already in use, and that color wheel would get really big when expanded to something like a 21-inch picture.  RCA was developing the tri-color electronic system that we all used and loved for many years and that was backwards compatible.

Well the FCC agreed to come back to the Princeton Lab for a final look at the RCA system, and the RCA engineers were busy at work a couple of days before the FCC showed up tuning up their cameras for the best possible pictures.  Dr. Brown walked over to the studio at noon to see how things were going, and when he arrived everyone was on a lunch break.  They had left a camera open and pointed at a bowl of fruit.  Dr Brown was a bit of a practical joker, and he got a bottle of blue tempra paint from the prop room and painted the banana in the bowl blue.  He left, and then came back just a little before quitting time to again see how things were going.  The engineers were sweating bullets.  They said, no matter how we adjust things, that damn banana keeps coming out blue!

I don't have any first hand confirmation of this, but I strongly suspect that this incident was the origin of the "Blue Banana Award" that was occasionally reference after that on broadcast TV for a very good practical joke.

Jim, W8KGI