- William C. Brown
William C. Brown (May 22, 1916 – February 3, 1999) was an American electrical engineer who helped to invent the
crossed-field amplifier in the 1950s and also pioneeredmicrowave power transmission in the 1960s.Brown received his BSEE fromIowa State University in 1937, and his MSEE from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1941. He joinedRaytheon in 1940 and began work on theirmagnetron microwave amplifier products. By 1952 his work on adapting magnetron principles to create a new broadband amplifier resulted in the 'Amplitron', today known more commonly as a crossed-field amplifier (CFA).In 1961 Brown published the first paper proposing microwave energy for power transmission, and in 1964 he demonstrated onWalter Cronkite 's "CBS Evening News " a microwave-powered modelhelicopter that received all the power needed for flight from a microwave beam. Between 1969 and 1975 Brown was technical director of a JPL-Raytheon program that beamed 30kilowatt s over a distance of 1 mile at 84% efficiency. He continued to make important contributions to this emerging technology until his retirement from Raytheon in 1994.Wireless power transmission is not a new idea; Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor).External links
* [http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/people.php?id=1234756&lid=1 William C. Brown biography at the IEEE Virtual Museum]
* [http://www.mtt.org/awards/WCB's%20distinguished%20career.htm William C. Brown biography on the IEEE MTT-S website]
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