[Paddlewise] Nobel Prize Winners Appropriate to Paddlers and This Forum

Those of us who have reached a "certain" age can remember when Bell
Telephone owned the phone system in most of the United States. In fact, they
owned even the telephones we used (and rented from them). I can remember as
a young ham radio enthusiast learning how to defeat the Bell engineers who
could spot a second telephone in your house be reading the impedance of the
lines. Yup, if you wanted a second phone in 1960 you had to pay 'em for it.

One of the good things about the Bell system was Bell Labs in New Jersey.
One of the two pre-eminent research institutions in the US during the early
years of the computer revolution (the other was Xerox Parc in Palo Alto,
CA), many good things came out of Bell Labs. Including the Unix operating
system which was declared by the now-defunct Byte Magazine in the 1980s. How
ironic that Unix is everywhere and Byte Magazine is... well... dead.

Bell Labs researchers have gathered up more than their fair share of Nobel
prizes over the years. Seven, I think. Not bad for a place that went out of
existence decades ago. The latest Nobel for physics was shared amongst three
men; two former Bell Labs researchers, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
each got a quarter of the full $1.4million prize. Their invention was the
charge-coupled-device (CCD) which is basically the light sensor you use when
you take digital photographs of your kayaking trips. I wonder if the board
of directors of Kodak and Polaroid had a shiver-moment back when they
discovered that tickling a semiconductor device in just the right way would
react to light.

The other two quarters (half) of the Nobel prize for physics this year went
to Charles K. Kao who was working at another now-defunct firm in - but in
England this time - who developed fiber optic cable. Without fiber optic
cable we would not have much in the way of broadband network services and
none of it would be cheap.

So all three recipients of the Nobel prize for physics in 2009 have a direct
impact on most paddlers... well any who take photographs and read this on
their computer. And long-gone Bell Labs rests comfortably on its laurels.

Oops... my iphone is ringing. Did I mention that the iphone (and all the
modern Mac computers) runs a version of Unix as its operating system? I
wonder where the editors of Byte Magazine are now. Using a Blackberry, no
doubt.

Craig Jungers
Moses Lake, WA
www.nwkayaking.net
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