Frank Gray (researcher)
Frank Gray ( * September 13, 1887 in Alpine, Indiana, † May 23, 1969 ) was an American physicist and researcher at Bell Laboratories, the original development department of the Bell Telephone Company, which was founded in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Between 1925 and 1955, he contributed greatly to the development of telecommunications and television. The best known today is the discovery Grays named after him, Gray code, which also serves as a coding method for transmitting digital sizes via analog signal paths and is also used in mathematics. Gray settled in this already well-known coding possibility patented in 1953.
The first significant, authored by Gray scientific writing was in 1927 a proposal to use a kind of flying spot scanner for television cameras. Here, a special picture tube is used to moving a light spot on the TV screen. This spot of light illuminates the film image, and is directed onto a photodetector, where the result is a line by line image of the brightness and color information of the film image. Three years later conducted further research on the development of a two-way mechanical scanning.
With Herbert Ives in 1927 he filed two additional patents to " electro-optical systems " and " electro-optical transmission ", which in 1930 and 1936 recognized.
Together with Pierre Mertz wrote Gray in 1934 a well-known and acclaimed essay on the mathematics of the scanning process. Later he contributed to the beginnings of the "digital revolution ", by embracing, along with Raymond Sears, William Goodall, John Robinson Pierce and other employees of Bell Labs, the binary code, which was used by Sears in its PCM tube supplied.