It is difficult to picture consumer electronics products without Liquid Crystal Displays or that one man was responsible nearly 46 years ago for the paper that would set the ball rolling for the use of LCDs.
George Heilmeier, a researcher at RCA Laboratories, along with Richard Williams published a report in 1963 suggesting the use of liquid crystal materials for display. That paper laid the groundwork towards the the use of LCDs in everything from watches to cameras and TVs.
“When we built several prototype displays we thought it would be great for shower doors,” laughs Heilmeier during an interview with Wired.com. “But it is amazing to see how far LCDs have come as a technology so many years after we first talked about them.”
On May 2, Heilmeier will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a non-profit organization that was founded in 1973 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations.
Every year the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducts a group of distinguished American inventors. So far 390 individuals have been honored including Thomas Edison and more recently Segway’s Dean Kamen and Steve Wozniak (not Steve Jobs since Wozniak holds the patent.) “We have two primary rules: The inventor has to have a US patent and their invention has to change the world,” says Jeffrey Dollinger, president of Invent Now, a division of the organization. This year the group received about 100 nominations and it will honor 15 individuals including former Intel CEO Andy Grove. (See complete list here.)
Heilmeier has been at the intersection of some of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the U.S. Following his work on LCDs, he became the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he managed projects including stealth aircrafts and artificial intelligence.
“The U.S. is still the world’s leader in fundamental research,” he says. “Though some people may not agree with me, I make the argument that US is spending a great deal on basic research. What we need is more big ideas, not just a demand for more money on research.”
Heilmeier’s comments are in sharp contrast to the perception among many U.S. technology leaders that lack of funding has led to a decline in fundamental research in the country.
Last year, iconic research institution Bell Labs decided to discontinue basic science research. Increasingly companies under shareholder pressure to show greater profit are cutting back on research budgets, Judy Estrin, former CTO of Cisco told Wired.com. America is facing an innovation crisis as the federal government has cut back on spending, other experts have said.
Heilmeier isn’t buying that. “I think academia has essentially overstated the case that we are beginning to lag,” he says. The bottom line for those people is they always want more money.”
During his reign as director of DARPA, Heilmeier says he often met with researchers seeking additional funding and was surprised to find that often they were reluctant to outline their ideas before the grants were awarded.
“People felt entitled for research dollars from DARPA and NSF but they told me they didn’t have the time to write proposals and reports,” he says. “I think academia spends too much time lobbying.”
What America lacks, he says, is the increasingly the ability to take basic research and find a way to commercialize it successfully. Take the LCD technology that RCA Labs helped pioneer. Seven years after his first big paper on the subject, Heilmeier left RCA to never return. Meanwhile Japanese companies built on Heilmeier’s work and went on to become among the biggest LCD manufacturers.
LCDs are now a part of his past, says Heilmeier. Now he spends time reading about breakthroughs in areas such as cognitive processing and cybersecurity. “One of the most exciting things in the future will be in cognitive processing where computers can learn, reason and teach,” he says. “And we are very much in the preliminary phases of that research now. That’s where the most exciting things will emerge in the next five to seven years.”
Photo: George Heilmeier at RCA Labs
