In March, 1958, when visiting in another engineer's office in the Denver Ramo Wooldridge facility, I was glancing through his copy of "Electrical Design News", a trade publication, and saw something very familiar -- essentially my chart and paper without my name! (I was happy to learn that it was still considered useful.) It had been published in Denver so I phoned and they sent a representative over who quickly agreed that it was my paper. They had obtained it from a manufacturer's in-house book. My name was added to the reprints and they paid me $75 for it (three times what I had received for the original.)
Intrigued with radio, I enrolled at The Radio Institute of California, a small private school in Los Angeles. It was a good move. My LAJC work had put me far ahead of most students there and I soon had an opportunity to teach a lab (I had to give up working toward an amateur radio license, one of the requirements for graduation from the school, and I never obtained it).
I made my first invention (never patented) when I assembled a "Beat Frequency Oscillator" for use in the Lab. Such oscillators need to have their frequency adjusted to a standard and I decided that the "magic eye" tubes, then popular as an indicator for use in tuning radios, could be used for the purpose. The implementation of the "Beat Indicator" is described in Appendix III.
Sometime later the chief instructor left and I was offered the opportunity to teach some of the theory on a temporary basis. (The chief instructor had a lot of old radio equipment that he been renting out for use in the movies -- a very profitable business.) The students liked me and I stayed on. It was a rewarding experience, but not great monetarily; $25 a week for five days and four nights of teaching and Saturday mornings to check the lab equipment. From then on my studies of radio were on my own. I made good use of the "yellow cars" then serving Los Angeles.
On to Undergraduate Work at Cal Tech
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