Lincoln Walsh (November 3, 1903 – November 17, 1971) was an engineer and inventor.

Early life and education

Walsh received his B.S. in electrical engineering from

Stevens Institute of Technology Stevens Institute of Technology is a Private university, private research university in Hoboken, New Jersey. Founded in 1870, it is one of the oldest technological universities in the United States and was the first college in America solely de ...

in 1926. He later studied at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

and at

Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United St ...

."LINCOLN WALSH, 68, OF ELECTRONIC FIRM"
''New York Times'', Nov. 19, 1971.

Career

After World War II, he founded Brooks Electronics Inc. During the war, he worked with Rudy Bozak at the Dinion Coil Company in Caledonia, New York, developing high voltage power supplies for radar use. Walsh worked as a member of the War Planning Board. Walsh may have been involved in the development of the Kettledrum Baffle that one associates with the first

Bozak Rudolph Thomas Bozak (1910–1982) was an audio electronics and acoustics designer and engineer in the field of sound reproduction. His parents were Bohemian Czech immigrants; Rudy was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Bozak studied at Milwaukee ...

speaker systems. He redesigned the "Mark II" (

Colossus computer Colossus was a set of computers developed by British cryptanalysis, codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used vacuum tube, thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean algebra ...

) power supply to prolong the unit's life. Later, he was a consultant on very large transformer designs for power distribution. He also developed a high-quality AM radio receiver and an aircraft collision avoidance system. Walsh´s interests extended to loudspeaker design. With the help of Bozak, he developed a direct-radiator design using a single speaker with an aluminum foil cone, operating out of a vertical column, and offering a wide frequency response. ''A Simple Quality Rating System for Loudspeakers and Audio Systems'' appeared in the Journal of the

Audio Engineering Society The Audio Engineering Society (AES) is a professional body for engineers, scientists, other individuals with an interest or involvement in the professional audio industry. The membership largely comprises engineers developing devices or product ...

for July, 1963. He went on to invent the wide-range coherent transmission-line

loudspeaker A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or, more fully, a speaker system) is a combination of one or more speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections (possibly including a crossover network). The speaker driver is an ...

, which was granted U.S. Patent 3,424,873 in 1969 (filed in 1964). Walsh realized that if you took an inverted cone and drove it from the apex, you could have a speaker with a perfect 360-degree horizontal radiation pattern available to reproduce all the audible frequency range. The vertical dispersion was controllable with the choice of materials. This offered a wide variety of designs, based on his patent.

Personal life

As a member of the War Planning Board, he met and later married Harriet Walsh. They were residents of Millington, New Jersey for many years. They had no children.

Legacy

In 1971, Martin Gersten founded '' Ohm Acoustics''. Gersten raised the capital needed to buy back the Walsh patent rights from a metal-casting company which had invested with Walsh. Walsh's new speaker design was developed and marketed by Ohm (the Ohm 'A'), after Gersten invented an edge-wound anodized aluminum voice coil, U.S.

Patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

3,935,402 (1974), which was needed to make the unit viable. Unfortunately, Walsh died before his speaker was released to the public. Ohm Chief Engineer, John Strohbeen, further developed Walsh's concepts.

References

External links

* http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/jaes.obit/JAES_V20_1_PG080.pdf * http://www.ohmspeakers.com/ * https://web.archive.org/web/20180506020339/http://www.german-physiks.com/technology/the-ddd-driver.html * https://www.theaudiocritic.com/back_issues/The_Audio_Critic_29_r.pdf {{DEFAULTSORT:Walsh, Lincoln 1903 births 1971 deaths American consultants Place of birth missing 20th-century American inventors Brooklyn College alumni Stevens Institute of Technology alumni Columbia University alumni