No DVD riches for the acknowledged father of optical storage

Sony and
Philips get credit for developing the compact disc in the early 1980s. But they
licensed technology that a young "tinkerer" Jim Russell developed 20 years
earlier. Seems like Russell enjoyed fixing appliances and radios after
school in Bremerton, where he also studied physics at Reed College in Portland.
When he wasn't fixing a toaster he was working with very early computers in
programming, not to mention coming up with control systems for nuclear reactors!

Russell, now 73 years of age, once worked for
General Electric which was taken over by a company called Battelle. Fortunately,
Battelle saw something in young Russell and gave him a lab and some free time to
work on a crazy system he came up with that used a laser to read digitzed
music discs and as they say, the rest is history.

Money was not Russell's motivation. A lifelong music fan, he was looking for a way to make records that wouldn't wear out from being played over and over again. "My original reason was I wanted better sound," he said, "but having come to this concept, the whole inductive leap and the whole system, I immediately realized this was good for storing any kind of information '” sound information, movies, data, databases, software, anything that you could think of that can be digitized." Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, music aficionados went to extreme lengths to get high-quality sound from records. Russell was the sort who used cactus needles on his record player; they had to be hand-sharpened after each use, but the sound was better and they wouldn't wear out albums as fast as metal needles. Russell thought a laser would work even better. Digital recordings could be perfect, and their sound wouldn't deteriorate from repeated use.

Cactus needles..I'm not worthy to even read about this
guy! Hey get this, Jim Russell is still tinkering too! Yes, he is down in his
basement doing consultant work and he isn't bitter at all. What a very special
human being. A wooden box on a shelf contains a set of faintly scored glass
plates, each about the size of a 3- by 5-inch notecard. They are precursors of
the DVD; each contains a digital recording of a television show taken off the
air in 1974 to prove that his idea for optical digital recording worked.

Stop by the Seattle Times and read the entire article. It's a good
one.

Source: Seattle Times