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GEORGE H. BROWN
1908-1987
WRITTEN BY KERNS H. POWERS
SUBMITTED BY WILLIAM M. WEBSTER
O NE OF THE WORLD S LEADING EXPERTS on antennas and a
near forty-year veteran of the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), George H. Brown died on December Il. 1987, at
his home in Princeton, New jersey. After a brilliant career
in electrical engineering research and engineering man-
agement, George Brown retired from RCA in 1972. He is
best known technically for his pioneering developments in
directional antennas and for his invention of the turnstile
antenna that has been used extensively for television
broadcasting at very high frequencies (VHF) throughout
the world. He is also well known as a participant in the
team at RCA Laboratories that developed the dot-sequen-
tial color television system and as the team leader who re-
lentlessly pursued its adoption as the U.S. standard for
broadcasting. The principles embodied in that system are
incorporated in all present-day systems of color television,
including NTSC (National Television Systems Committee),
PAL (Phase-Alternating Line), and SECAM (Sequential Couleur
aver Memoire).
Born October 14, 190S, in North Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
the son of a train dispatcher for the Chicago, Milwaukee
and St. Paul Railroad, George Brown graduated from high
school at Portage, Wisconsin, and entered the University of
Wisconsin at Madison where he studied electrical engineering.
35
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36
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
At the end of his junior year, he spent the summer in the
Test Department at the General Electric Company in
Schenectady, New York, a prestigious position for a college
junior. An outstanding student who often took a heavier-
than-normal schedule of courses, George won two highly
competitive graduate fellowships administered by the
University's Electrical Engineering Department. He received
a B.S. in 1930, M.S. in 1931, and Ph.D. in 1933. While a
graduate student at Wisconsin, George met and married
Elizabeth Ward, also a graduate student, who would bear
him twin sons and help to keep his life on an even keel for
over fifty years.
After completing his studies at Wisconsin, George joined
RCA at Camden, New jersey, to do research in antennas
and wave propagation. He moved to the new central research
laboratories of RCA at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1942. From
the position of member of the technical staff, he was appointed
director of the Systems Research Laboratory in 1952; chief
engineer, Commercial and Industrial Electronic Products
at Camden in 1957; vice-president, Engineering, for the
RCA Corporation in 1959; vice-president, Research and
Engineering, 1961; executive vice-presiclent, Research and
Engineering, 1965; and executive vice-president, Patents and
Licensing, 1968. He served as a member of the RCA board
of directors from 1965 until his retirement in 1972.
In acIdition to his service to RCA, he served as a member
of the board of directors of the Trane Company, La Crosse,
Wisconsin, and of the First National Bank of Hamilton Square,
New Jersey.
George was always active in engineering societies. He
was a fellow of both the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE)
and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (ATEE)
before the merger of those two societies into the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was
also a fellow of the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Science and of the Royal Television Society before
which he delivered the prestigious Shoenberg Memorial
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GEORGE H. BROWN
37
Lecture at the Royal Institution in 1972. He was a member
of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and was elected eminent member
of Eta Kappa Nu in 1967. Among his many awards are the
IEEE Edison Medal in 1967, the De Forest Audion Award
of the Veteran Wireless Operators Association in 1968, ant!
an honorary Dr. Eng. at the University of Rhode Island in
1968. He was elected to the National Academy of Engi-
neering in 1965.
In spite of his busy schedule as an executive in RCA, he
found time to serve on several advisory committees. These
included the Ford Foundation Advisory Board, the Advisory
Committee of the Office of Scientific Personnel of the Na-
tional Research Council, advisory groups to NASA, the
Postmaster General's Advisory Council on Research and
Engineering, and, probably his favorite, the George Wash-
ington Council of the Boy Scouts of America. He served as
a member of the executive board of the Council from 1954
to 1971. Starting as chairman of the Stony Brook District
Committee in 1954, he advanced to a vice-presidential post
on the Council in 1957 and to the executive committee in
1967, and served on the Region 2 I~ong-Range Planning
Committee for several years. He was awarded the Silver
Beaver Award of the Boy Scouts of America in 1962 and
the Silver Antelope Award in 1969.
During his career at RCA, George Brown was awarded
eighty patents and published over one hundred technical
papers. Of the most significant patents are the turnstile
antenna mentioned earlier; a vestigial-sideband filter for
VHF broadcasting; and a method for bonding thermoplas-
tic materials by radio frequency heating, used initially in
the construction of plastic raincoats and still used today in
the manufacture of plastic bags and other products. His
early work on the design of directional antennas was published
in the Proceedings of the IRE in 1935, 1936, and 1937, and
has been republished in many engineering handbooks to
the present day.
Perhaps the greatest challenge that George Brown faced
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38
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
in his illustrious career was his pursuit of color television
standards in the United States and abroad. While he was
still a member of the technical staff at RCA Laboratories,
heading a small group in antenna and transmitter technology,
an innovative team of researchers under Raymond D. Kell
had developed the concept of a color television system that
would be compatible with the existing black-and-white television
system that was placed in service in the years following
World War II. At about the same time a group under Dr.
Peter Goldmark of CBS, who had been working for many
years on a field-sequential method for color involving a
revolving disk of color filters placed in front of both the
television camera and the display tubes, had petitioned the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval
of the field-sequential system for commercial broadcasts in
color. Although the field-sequential system was simple in
principle, it required a higher bandwidth and was not
compatible with the existing black-and-white service. That
is, broadcasts in the field-sequentil] color system could not
be viewed on the existing black-and-white television sets,
even in black and white, because of the requirement for a
different frequency of synchronization. The RCA Laboratories
approach, called simultaneous color television, was more
complex, also required a higher bandwidth, but at least
had a measure of compatibility with the existing service
and would not make obsolete the several million TV sets
already sold. Hearings on the proposed CBS system were
to be held before the FCC in the fall of 1949. Under the
guidance of General David Sarnoff, then president of RCA,
the Laboratories were directed in early 1949 to improve
the simultaneous system and to prepare it for demonstrations
before the Commission within nine months time. It was at
this point that George Brown was assigned (without promotion)
the responsibility to coordinate the efforts of the several
groups at RCA working on the various aspects of color television
and to ensure that the required equipment could be ready
for the scheduled demonstrations. During this short period
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GEORGE H. BROWN
39
of time, major improvements to the system were invented,
reducing the required bandwidth and improving compatibility.
Thus new tests were required, new experimental equipments
had to be constructed to supplement the existing equipment,
and the many logistical tasks involved in setting up demon-
strations had to be solved. Under George Brown's able
leadership, the demonstrations were successfully carried out,
with George personally writing much of the supporting
documentation for the hearings. Although the effort failed
in its attempt to convince the FCC that the compatible
approach (by now called the dot-sequential system) was
preferred over the incompatible field-sequential method,
the entire television industry did become convinced, and
the unfortunate FCC decision that selected the field sequential
system as the U.S. standard was reversed three years later.
George Brown's reputation as a reconteur spread! widely
both inside and outside RCA. He was always in great demand
as master of ceremonies for retirement and other social
events, as his sarcastic wit and intriguing embellishments
of true life stories about both friends and adversaries kept
him in good stead for entertaining speeches, even on seri-
ous subjects. Through the encouragement of his many
colleagues and friends, his early retirement years were devoted
to writing his memoirs entitled and part of which I was-
Recollections of a Research Engineer, (1979, Angus Cupar Pub
fishers, ~17 Hunt Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540), which
is replete with his amusing stories while at the same time
constituting a reliable history of the technical development
of television broadcasting and related fields.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
george brown
