[ETS/PARC List] Television pioneer Thomas Goldsmith dies at 99

[Victor J. Pennetta]

FYI.

Also some very interesting history about Tom Goldsmith. My thanks to Dave Sica of the New Jersey Antique Radio Club for this info.

Victor,  KC2NBC


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Sica" <davesica at juno.com>
To: <njarc at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 3:01 PM
Subject: [NJARC] Television pioneer Thomas Goldsmith
> 
> Television pioneer Thomas Goldsmith dies at 99. 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/television/15goldsmith.html?_r=2&r
> ef=obituaries
> 
> Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., a TV Technology Pioneer, Dies at 99 
> 
> Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., a pioneer of television technology who with his
> boss, Allen B. DuMont, and others in the nascent industry perfected the
> cathode ray tube that eventually let little wooden boxes with grainy
> black-and-white screens bring moving images into millions of homes, died
> on March 5 at his home in Lacey, Wash. He was 99.
> 
> The cause was complications of a hip fracture, his son Judson said.
> 
> On April 30, 1939, visitors to the World's Fair in Queens crowded around
> small fish-bowl-shaped screens of DuMont television sets to watch
> President Franklin D. Roosevelt - against a panorama of fountains and
> flags - officially declare the exposition open. Those televisions were
> largely made possible by the breakthrough work of Dr. DuMont, with his
> protégé, Dr. Goldsmith, by his side. At the time, fewer than 1,500 DuMont
> sets had been sold around the country.
> 
> "DuMont and Goldsmith helped pioneer turning oscilloscopes into full
> television displays," Alexander Magoun, the author of "Television: The
> Life Story of a Technology" (Greenwood Press, 2007), said in an interview
> Wednesday.
> 
> Dr. Magoun, who is also the executive director of the David Sarnoff
> Library, an archive for the Radio Corporation America, in Princeton, said
> that other scientists, including those at RCA, had also made advances in
> the use of the cathode ray tube.
> 
> "During World War II," Dr. Magoun said, "DuMont and Goldsmith shared
> their knowledge with RCA and other companies for using cathode ray tubes
> in radar displays and, after the war, for picture-tube displays."
> 
> Cathode ray tubes had already been used for nearly 30 years by scientists
> and engineers for oscilloscopes, devices that create a graphic display of
> electronic signals. An electron gun inside the oscilloscope shoots a beam
> of electrons at materials called phosphors coating the inside of the
> tube's face plate, causing them to light up and allowing analysis of the
> electrical signal. 
> 
> "But in television, if you remember black-and-white TV," Dr. Magoun
> explained, "you're illuminating the entire picture tube screen so that
> you can watch moving video. DuMont and Goldsmith devised a variety of
> engineering and manufacturing techniques necessary to make that possible
> on a mass commercial basis."
> 
> Dr. Goldsmith was research director for the Allen B. DuMont Laboratory
> from 1936 to 1965. Dr. DuMont, who died in 1965, opened the laboratory in
> the garage of his home in Upper Montclair, N.J., in 1931; it later moved
> to a former pickle factory in Passaic. By 1947, with revenues from the
> sale of his television sets, he had started the DuMont Television
> Network. It had three stations at the time: WABD (later WNEW) in New
> York, WDTV in Pittsburgh, and WTTG in Washington. The last three letters
> of WTTG, which is now part of the Fox network, were chosen by Dr. DuMont
> to honor his protégé.
> 
> Thomas Toliver Goldsmith Jr. was born in Greenville, S.C., on Jan. 9,
> 1910, the younger of two sons of Thomas and Charlotte Manly Goldsmith.
> His father was an insurance and real estate broker, and his mother was a
> concert pianist. 
> 
> After building crystal radio sets as a teenager, Dr. Goldsmith graduated
> from Furman University in Greenville in 1931. He received his Ph.D. in
> physics from Cornell in 1936. For his doctoral research, he needed to
> build an oscilloscope. He contacted Dr. DuMont, bought a cathode ray tube
> and began a correspondence that soon led to his hiring at the DuMont
> Laboratory. Dr. Goldsmith taught physics at Furman from 1966 to 1986. 
> 
> Besides his son, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Helen
> Wilcox; another son, Thomas III; a daughter, Virginia Beekman; six
> grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
> 
> The DuMont Television Network closed in 1955, partly because of a decline
> in sales of DuMont television sets, which had supported it. Five years
> later, the laboratory merged with Fairchild Camera.
> 
> The financial difficulties of the DuMont enterprises kept Dr. Goldsmith
> from making his mark in what decades later would be a booming industry.
> In 1947, he received patent No. 2,455,992 for a video game that allowed a
> player to shoot down an image of an airplane with a beam aimed at the
> screen. 
> 
> "Here was an honored engineer in the television industry who worked for
> an undercapitalized company," Dr. Magoun said. "Here is an interactive
> television video game in 1947 that the company simply could not afford to
> take further, beyond the patent."
> ____________________________________________________________
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