[NJARC] Television pioneer Thomas Goldsmith

[Dave Sica]

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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