William C. Brown (May 22, 1916 – February 3, 1999) was an American electrical engineer who helped to invent the

crossed-field amplifier A crossed-field amplifier (CFA) is a specialized vacuum tube, first introduced in the mid-1950s and frequently used as a microwave amplifier in very-high-power transmitters. Raytheon engineer William C. Brown's work to adapt magnetron principle ...

in the 1950s and also pioneered microwave power transmission in the 1960s. Brown received his BSEE from

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of th ...

in 1937, and his MSEE from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

in 1941. He joined

Raytheon Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitali ...

in 1940 and began work on their

magnetron The cavity magnetron is a high-power vacuum tube used in early radar systems and currently in microwave ovens and linear particle accelerators. It generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field while ...

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 on

Walter Cronkite Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the ''CBS Evening News'' for 19 years (1962–1981). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the mo ...

's ''

CBS Evening News The ''CBS Evening News'' is the flagship evening television news program of CBS News, the news division of the CBS television network in the United States. The ''CBS Evening News'' is a daily evening broadcast featuring news reports, feature st ...

'' a microwave-powered model

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attribu ...

that received all the power needed for flight from a microwave beam. Between 1069 and 1975 Brown was technical director of a JPL-Raytheon program that beamed 30

kilowatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James ...

s over a distance of at 84% efficiency. He continued to make important contributions to this emerging technology until his retirement from Raytheon in 1984.

References

External links

William C. Brown biography at the IEEE Global History Network

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, William C 20th-century American engineers Raytheon Company people 1916 births 1999 deaths Iowa State University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni

See also

References

External links