Michael L. Mallary is an engineer, physicist, inventor, and author who is noted for his contributions in the areas of

magnetic recording Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ...

and

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are con ...

hard disk drives A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

(HDD).B. Gurney "Michael Mallary Receives 2013 Achievement Award", IEEE Magnetics Society Newsletter, Vol. 53, No. 1, p. 3, Jan. 2013
/ref>Computer History Museum: Oral History #102781590: Michael Mallary, June 19, 2019
/ref> His work has concentrated on developing and optimizing magnetic components to maximize data storage density. In particular, he is responsible to inventing the 'trailing-shield' write head used universally in modern HDDs. Mallary is a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

and recipient of the IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award.

Background and education

Michael (Mike) Mallary, born May 6, 1945, was raised in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. His mother was an advertising executive and his father was the sculptor

Robert Mallary Robert W. Mallary (December 2, 1917 – February 10, 1997) was an American abstract expressionist sculptor and pioneer in computer art. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was renowned for his Neo-Dada or "junk art" sculpture, created from found materia ...

. He attended schools in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

and

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

. He attended

Archbishop Stepinac High School Archbishop Stepinac High School is an American Single-sex education, all-boys' Catholic Church, Roman Catholic high school in White Plains, New York. It was operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York until the 2009–2010 school yea ...

where he built a

Jacob's Ladder Jacob's Ladder () is a ladder or staircase leading to Heaven that was featured in a dream the Biblical Patriarch Jacob had during his flight from his brother Esau in the Book of Genesis (chapter 28). The significance of the dream has been de ...

and a crude

electron microscope An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing it ...

as science projects. Mallary received the S.B. degree in physics from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, Cambridge, in 1966 working under John King. He received his Ph.D. degree from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

in 1971 writing a thesis on

high-energy physics Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the stu ...

under the direction of Prof Frank J. Sciulli. From 1972 to 1974, Mallary was a post doctoral fellow at

Rutherford Laboratory The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the Atla ...

Career

In 1974, Mallary joined the Magnetic Corporation of America in

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the Technological and industrial history of the United States, American Industrial Revoluti ...

, designing large

superconducting magnets A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct much ...

intended for

nuclear fusion Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction, reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a larger nuclei, nuclei/neutrons, neutron by-products. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the rele ...

, high energy physics,

magnetic separation Magnetic separation is the process of separating components of mixtures by using a magnet to attract magnetic substances. The process that is used for magnetic separation separates non-magnetic substances from those which are magnetic. This techniq ...

, power generation, etc. Trailing Shield Write Head

In 1980, Mallary joined

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) in

Shrewsbury, Massachusetts Shrewsbury (/ˈʃruzberi/ ''SHROOZ-bury'') is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 38,325 according to the 2020 United States census, in nearly 15,000 households. Incorporated in 1727, Shrewsbury prospere ...

, as a head modeler and designer to support their effort to produce thin film heads for the

RA90 The RA90 disk drive was the first Digital Equipment Corporation drive to be based on "thin film" technology. Prior to the RA90 all Digital disk drives used "oxide" disks, which were an aluminum disk coated with a polyurethane binder resin containi ...

disk drive. Bob Rottmayer was the head of the group. At DEC Mallary came up with the idea of the so-called "Diamond Head". This novel approach basically wrapped the yoke around the coil twice - effectively doubling the number of turns. (Maximizing readback voltage is always of paramount importance. This inductive head design was widely deployed, but it was eventually upstaged by the advent of magnetoresistive heads). From the early 1990s to 2008, Mallary worked for a succession of HDD companies including Rocky Mountain Magnetics, MKE,

Quantum In physics, a quantum (: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This me ...

Maxtor Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate Technology, Seagate in 2006. It was revived as a bra ...

, and Seagate working mainly on head design but also on manufacturing aspects such as servowriting. It was during this period that he became involved with th
International Storage Industry Consortium
(INSIC) on the Extra High Density Recording (EHDR) project working with

Mason Williams Mason Douglas Williams (born August 24, 1938) is an American classical guitarist, composer, singer, writer, comedian, and poet, best known for his 1968 instrumental " Classical Gas" and for his work as a comedy writer on ''The Smothers Brothers ...

Mark Kryder Mark Howard Kryder (born October 7, 1943 in Portland, Oregon) was Seagate Corp.'s senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. Kryder holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a ...

, Dave Thompson and others. The need for continued increases in areal data density led to an intense focus on

perpendicular recording Perpendicular recording (or perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR), is a technology for data recording on magnetic media, particularly hard disks. It was first proven advantageous in 1976 by ...

which offered the potential of areal-densities up to 1 Terabit per square inch. Earlier at DEC in 1985, Mallary had invented the trailing shield (or shielded-pole) write head for perpendicular recording. This design is able to reach higher recording areal-densities because it provides higher field gradients and more advantageous field angles than a conventional monopole head (see diagram). Perpendicular recording technology is presently used in all hard disk drives and Mallary's trailing-shield head design is ubiquitous. In 2009, Mallary joined

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). History 1970s Western Digital ...

in San Jose working on advanced recording technologies including

Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (pronounced "''hammer''") is a magnetic storage technology for greatly increasing the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device such as a hard disk drive by temporarily heating the disk materia ...

(HAMR) an
Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording
(MAMR).

Awards and recognition

In 2007, Mallary was elevated to IEEE Fellow for "contributions to recording devices". In 2009, Mallary was selected as a Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecturer and gave presentations worldwide with the title "The Evolution and Revolutions in Disk Drive Recording". In 2013, Mallary received the IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award for "sustained contributions to thin film magnetic recording write head designs; most notably for the invention of the shielded write head structure for perpendicular recording". In June 2019, Mallary was interviewed by Grant Saviers and Tom Yamashita as part of the Computer History Museum Oral History Series.

Patents and publications

Mallary is an author or coauthor on around 100 U.S. patents. These cover a variety of areas although bulk of them are associated with magnetic write head design for HDDs and, in particular, the invention of the trailing-shield write head for

.M. Mallary, "Vertical magnetic recording arrangement", US Patent 4656546, Apr 7, 1987
/ref> Mallary is also the author or coauthor of about 50 technical publications again focussed on magnetic recording for hard disk drives and often in collaboration with academia. Mallary wrote the chapter that details the operation and design of magnetic

recording head ''Tape Head'' is the seventh studio album by American rock band King's X King's X is an American Rock music, rock band formed in Springfield, Missouri, in 1979. They were first called the Edge and later became Sneak Preview before settli ...

s in ''The Physics of Ultra High Density Magnetic Recording'', a book edited by M. Plumer, J. van Ek, and D. Weller published in 2001. Mallary is the author of a book and a video on cosmology and evolution entitled “Our Improbable Universe: A Physicist Considers How We Got Here” first published in 2004 with a second edition in 2018. The book details how highly tuned (and hence improbable?) are the various constants that determine our physical universe. The book then goes on to examine evolution and society from a similar perspective.M. Mortimer, "Book Review: Our Improbable Universe", Universe Today: Space and Astronomy News, Feb. 15, 2005
/ref> Mallary is an advocate and activist for the use of nuclear power to mitigate the effects of climate change
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mallary, Michael Fellows of the IEEE 1945 births Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni California Institute of Technology alumni 20th-century American engineers Living people