Day 16 - Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. Is Out Of This World!

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I love outer space. I do. I love looking at pics on NASA's website. I was absolutely in love with the Mars Rover, and I am always geeked out when we discover something cool beyond the boundary of our atmosphere.

Pluto!

I do not pretend to know how any of it works, but I do love to read about it.

So, when I ran across Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. I was stoked. I was also flummoxed about much of what he did. Let me explain.

Dr. Alcorn was born in 1940. I could understand that part.

He was not only a brilliant man who graduated with honors from Occidental College in Los Angeles, but also lettered in both football and basketball.

So far so good.

Then, he got his PH.D. from Howard in atomic and molecular engineering in the early 1960s.

Okay, got it.

Mars Rover

He spent twelve years working for IBM and became an IBM Visiting Professor at Howard University teaching electrical engineering.

Okay. Not so hard to understand. Then, he went to work for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

This is when things get both interesting and completely difficult to explain. Let me start by saying that he holds twenty patents for inventing things.

Most of the things he invented...absolutely unintelligible to me. I can write them out and research them, and then they make sense, but in terms of explaining them to anyone, I would need a dictionary and more space here than I mean to spend on any one inventor though he really deserves it.

To that end, I will explain one of them as completely as I can, give a summary of what another is, and then, if you really want to do it, you can look up all of the other things he's invented.

In 1979 he started patenting things. The first ones had to do with semiconductors for IBM. 

What is a semiconductor?





In 1984, Dr. Alcorn patented a thing that changed the way we look at space....literally.

He filed a patent for the X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer. This thing allowed for the detection of radio signatures at a more distant and accurate rate than previously possible and influenced the continued evolution of imaging devices.

What does that mean?

x-ray Imaging 

"Used with space telescopes and other satellites, x-ray imaging spectrometers provide highly useful data for a wide range of scientific and technical applications. With improvements that addressed structural and performance deficiencies, Alcorn's devices and their descendants have been used to conduct planetary mapping, search for new planets, create star charts to reveal motions of systems, and examine deep space phenomena."

In other words, most of the coolest images we have of distant things in space, all of our information we have as we search for "earthlike planets", the mapping of Pluto, the Giant Earth discovery, and many of those other cool images are possible because of Dr. Alcorn. I have been a huge fan of his work for years, and I had no idea!

In 1999, Dr. Alcorn was awarded the Technology Leadership Award. One of two awards that can be awarded to NASA employees. That was the year he invented the Airborne topographical Mapping System.

In 2015 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Dr. George Edward Alcorn  Fr.

I give you George Edward Alcorn Jr.

A man who has got us closer to the stars!

Celebrate Black History!