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Bill Brown
(1916-1999), was born on an Iowa
farm. He earned his BSEE degree at Iowa State
University. Initially working at RCA in Camden, NJ,
he took a scholarship opportunity to go back to
school, earning
his MSEE at MIT in 1939. He joined the Raytheon
Company and was soon in charge of the magnetron product line. He invented a
cousin to the magnetron, the "amplitron", (or Cross
Field Amplifier). Unlike the magnetron, which was
just an oscillator, the amplitron could amplify a
broad band of microwave frequencies. The amplitron
had a long and successful career in military and
space communications. Later he designed and built the amplitron which powered the
reliable and efficient long distance communications
on the Apollo Moon
missions, enabling the world to see and hear Neil
Armstrong's immortal steps and words, "That's one
small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
directly from the Moon. Brown modified his
amplitron to greatly increase its power output,
leading Brown to realize a new possibility - microwave power
transmission
(MPT), the key technology for Space Solar Power.
Wireless power transmission had been
suggested, but not successfully shown
by Nikola Tesla and others, they incorrectly
assumed that power density always
fell off as the square of the
distance. Through
theoretical and experimental work by
G. Goubau, Schwering and others it was
learned that at high
frequencies, such as microwave
frequencies, power flow
can become highly efficient and can be
transmitted with efficiencies
approaching 100 percent by a beam
waveguide. Hardware
necessary to enable microwave generation
had become
available through the work of many
researchers,
including Bill Brown, on radar
and other work during WWII and
subsequent years. Armed with
that research, Bill Brown then
demonstrated MPT showing a small
helicopter powered by a microwave beam
stayed aloft at 60 feet for 10 hours;
featured in 1964 on Walter Cronkite's
newscast, showing
publicly the value of this new
capability. Bill
invented the rectifying antenna, or rectenna,
in 1964 and patented it in 1969.
This
new concept to capture and
gently and efficiently beam
the sun's power directly
into existing electric power
grids on the Earth, has
become an
increasingly
attractive idea
to
Japan,
China, and many
other countries desiring
low-CO2 baseload power
generation. Bill was awarded the Microwave
Pioneer Award in 1995, and
IEEE-MTT's highest honor, the Microwave
Career Award in 1999 for a
"lifetime career of meritorious
service and technical
excellence". Learn more
about his work at the
IEEE-MTT Career award reception
address on youtube. -
accepted in his behalf by his
colleague and friend Dick
Dickinson. 1. "Beamed
Microwave Power Transmission and its Application to
Space", IEEE
Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques,
Volume 40, No. 6, June 1992, http://www.utdallas.edu/~pxm017500/gap4s/Doc/Ref/Recten/00141357.pdf 4. The Microwave
Career Award in 1999, http://www.mtt.org/images/files/AWARDS_media/Career_Awards/1999_Brown.pdf Paul Jaffe(NRL) and James McSpadden(Raytheon)'s wrote an excellent overview of "Energy Conversion and Transmission Modules for Space Solar Power" for the June 2013 IEEE Proceedings which was entirely devoted to Wireless (Microwave) Power Transmission. |
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