David Paul Gregg (March 11, 1923 – November 8, 2001) was an American engineer. He was the inventor of the

optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data ( bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surface ...

(disk). Gregg was inspired to create the optical disc in 1958 while working at California electronics company, Westrex, a part of

Western Electric The Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company officially founded in 1869. A wholly owned subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph for most of its lifespan, it served as the primary equipment ma ...

. His patent for a "Videodisk" was filed in March 1962 (USPO 3350503) while working to advance electron beam recording and reproducing. Gregg went to work at 3M's Mincom division with experienced television videotape engineers Wayne Johnson and Dean De Moss. The three men subsequently filed patents to cover a disc-recording system, a way to duplicate discs, and reproducing TV signals from photographic discs. When Mincom contracted Stanford's SRI to further the research, Gregg left and formed his own company, Gauss Electrophysics. In 1968 the Gregg and Gauss patents were purchased by MCA (

Music Corporation of America MCA Inc. (originally an initialism for Music Corporation of America) was an American media conglomerate founded in 1924. Originally a talent agency with artists in the music business as clients, the company became a major force in the film ind ...

), which helped develop the technology further. His designs and patents paved the way for the

LaserDisc The LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium, initially licensed, sold and marketed as MCA DiscoVision (also known simply as "DiscoVision") in the United States in 1978. Its diameter typical ...

, which helped with the creation of the DVD,

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in O ...

s, and

MiniDisc MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio. Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 and released it in November of that year fo ...

. In 1963 he also invented a video disk camera which could store several minutes' worth of images onto an optical video disk. There was no patent files for the camera and only little is known about it. Gregg died in

Culver City, California Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,779. Founded in 1917 as a "whites only" sundown town, it is now an ethnically diverse city with what was called the "third-most ...

in November 2001 at the age of 78. When Gregg had improvised his invention, he imagined himself as a consumer. He interpreted that the LaserDisc (also known as the optical disc), "had to be of extremely low-cost, which implied the utmost simplicity, lowest material and processing costs, and user friendliness."

References

External links

About.com article about David GreggEntry in Smart Computing encyclopedia
(via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) Gregg, D. P. (1997). Patents and inventorship issues over the last thirty years of optical storage. Paper presented at the , 3109(1) doi:10.1117/12.280678
Another article.
1923 births 2001 deaths 20th-century American engineers 20th-century American inventors {{US-inventor-stub

See also

References

External links