Top ten analog engineers

Don't forget Mitch Ratcliffe the radio guy, Robert Watson-Watt the radar guy, the unnamed heroes at Mullards who designed the Hanbury-Brown correlator, Fred Terman the network analysis guy, Edwin Armstrong the FM, superhet, and superregen guy, Thomas Edison the diode guy.....

Analog folks all.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'd question Bob Pease and especially Jim Williams. Jim mostly does appnotes and magazine articles, and his stuff is a tad klunky at that. He's more of an energetic technician.

John

Jim Solomon... intellectual thief that I once worked for at Motorola.

In a paper he claimed that he designed the multiplier (Gilbert's cell) until the academic community descended on him.

Now I note he claims creation of the BiFET OpAmp... my Master's thesis was the first. Looks like he took my work to National with him and claimed it as his own.

Slowman is the same kind of thief. ...Jim Thompson

Yup. Like Win Hill ;-)

A list like that is a lot like the list of AGW supporters... their only real accomplishment is as co-back-patters. ...Jim Thompson

What I tell every starry-eyed newbie engineer that comes my way:

You don't get credit for being _good_, you get credit for being _recognized_ as being good. How well you are recognized goes something like (self PR)(real goodness); since even a slob has a teeny bit of real goodness about him someplace, an energetically self-promoting slob will be recognized over a genius wallflower every time.

So blow your own damn horn, and take those 'top ten' lists with a grain of salt.

He was an analogue angineer, not an analog engineer....

Peter Baxandall D.T.N. Williamson Peter Walker John Linsley-Hood

and the analogue/electromechanicals: P.G.A.H. Voigt Herbert Holman

How about the OLD analog guys? Eccles and Jordan, and Steinmetz? We all build on their foundation work.

Where's Harold Black? Philo Farnsworth?

Make sure you get a job with an outfit that lets you blow it. Rather than one that labels your work 'proprietary' and has strict rules about publishing even the stuff you do on your own time.

And definitely don't go to work for an outfit that takes your work and has the boss' idiot son-in-law present it to IEEE working groups.

Personal experience?

I worked for years for an outfit that was very uneven in that regard -- when it came to really stupid scheduling snafus they were as shortsighted as they came. But they were good (or indifferent) about letting you publish stuff that didn't impinge on their specific technology.

Even in a pathological company it's good to blow your own horn -- to get raises, so the boss realizes he needs to keep you on to generate fodder for his idiot son in law, and (most especially) so that when you can cut them loose there's a good pool of folks in your area who realize that you're good in your own right.

How many OLD farts here even remember Eccles and Jordan? Or Millman and Taub ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Honorable mention for Ohm, Ampere, Faraday, Henry, Volta, Maxwell, that crowd? Granted, they were more physicists than engineers (and Volta stuck live wires in his ears -- ugh!), but it was physics with a pretty darn practical bent.

Then Marconi & Edison (more an engineering manager -- he had paid grunts who worked under his direction, then he got the credit).

Etc.

I do. I use their invention every day!

Tim

Strictly speaking, isn't that digital?

At a microscopic level EVERYTHING is ANALOG :-) ...Jim Thompson

Digital is a subset of analog, which is a subset of physics.

I have a major in all of them. ;-)

Tim

Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

...

Jim-out-touch-with-reality-Thompson gives his imagination free run yet once more.

It is interesting to wonder why he might think that I might have claimed credit for somebody else's work - it isn't as if he's got access to much of my work, and in the stuff that is available via scholar.google.org I was being particularly careful to cite my sources (as I was in the stuff I did in industry, but Jim won't have access to any of that).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen