Dartmouth Engineer

CAMERA ON A CHIP: Eric Fossum’s 1995 CMOS image sensor refocused photographic technology. Photograph courtesy of Amy Etra/BusinessWeek.

Co-Inventor: Professor Eric Fossum

By Lee Michaelides

What ubiquitous consumer product came out of the space program?

The right answer isn’t Tang, but CMOS: complementary metal-oxide semiconductor active pixel image sensor. You may not recognize the name, but chances are you’ve got several around the house. Practically every cell phone, digital camera or laptop computer that creates a digital image uses one. The CMOS sensor not only spawned a digital revolution, but also earned its co-inventor, Thayer professor Eric Fossum, a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Back in the 1990s Fossum led a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab that came up with CMOS technology as a way to reduce the size of cameras launched on interplanetary spacecraft. Fossum also foresaw the terrestrial uses for his invention, and in 1995 he and lab colleagues started Photobit, a company that licensed the CMOS technology from NASA. A decade later Photobit’s successor company sold its 1 billionth sensor.

Today Fossum, who joined the Thayer faculty in 2010, teaches classes in electronic devices and circuits and the “Introduction to Innovation” class in Thayer’s Ph.D. Innovation Program. He’s also credited with more than 240 publications and 135 patents. (And he has a dozen more pending.) His most recent patent, No. 7,916,193 B2, for an “Interpolator for a CMOS image sensor using a digital register” was granted March 29, five weeks before his May 4 Hall of Fame induction.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations and Summer 2011 sets of images on Flickr.

Inventor: Dean Spatz ’66 Th’67

By Lee Michaelides

Reverse osmosis (RO) wasn’t invented at Thayer. Eighteenth-century French physicist Jean Antoine Nollet gets the credit for that. However, two centuries after Nollet’s discovery, RO was still not much more than a laboratory phenomenon until a Thayer student project helped create a new multi-million dollar RO industry.

PURE GENIUS: Students Dean Spatz ’66 Th’67, right, and Chris Miller ’66 Th’67 decontaminate water through reverse osmosis. Photograph from Thayer School Archives.

By way of review, RO is a “process by which a solvent such as water is purified of solutes by being forced through a semipermeable membrane through which the solvent, but not the solutes, may pass,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.

When Dean Spatz ’66 Th’67 arrived at Dartmouth, commercial applications for reverse osmosis systems were in their infancy. In ES 21: “Introduction to Engineering,” Spatz and Chris Miller ’66 Th’67 were given a jar of brackish water and told to find a way to make it potable. The pair came up with a prototype for an RO purification system. They ramped up their undergraduate project into graduate-level research that eventually led to Spatz winning contracts from the Department of the Interior to develop low-pressure reverse osmosis systems. Spatz also thought up new applications for the emerging technology. Shortly after getting his degree from Thayer, for example, he built a reverse osmosis system for a friend’s maple sugar operation to separate the maple sugar from the sap.

In 1969 Spatz co-founded an RO company, Osmonics, with longtime Thayer Overseer Ralph E. Crump (see “Inventions: Cryosurgical Instruments”). The company had just two employees, Spatz and his wife, Carol, working out of their garage in Minnetonka, Minn. The husband and wife team did everything themselves, from rolling membrane elements to mailing press releases. Their first machine was sold to the Mayo Clinic for kidney dialysis. The second went to a car wash for a rinse water system. From these humble origins, the company grew into a world leader in reverse osmosis filtration. In 2003 General Electric bought Osmonics for $275 million.

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set of images on Flickr.

­Inventor: Ralph E. Crump

By Lee Michaelides

Ralph Crump, a member of the Thayer Board of Overseers from 1986 to 2009, has long had an eye for the eye. In the 1960s he invented a tiny refrigerator that was, for 16 years, the state-of-the-art technology for cataract removal. The “cryosurgical instrument” that froze and safely removed cataracts was produced by his company, Frigitronics, and was later adapted for other surgical procedures. Frigitronics also invented a soft contact lens originally intended as a drug delivery device. It proved so comfortable that it became a consumer product known as the SoftCon lens.

Crump has been involved with Thayer ever since the 1960s, when Dean Myron Tribus, formerly Crump’s teacher and colleague at UCLA, tapped him to help guide entrepreneurial activities. Crump became an avid supporter of the work Professor John Collier ’72 Th’77 was doing on orthopedic implants.

Crump also turned an interested eye on grad student Stuart Trembly Th’83. “We discussed treating near-sightedness by application of microwave energy to the cornea,” says Trembly, now a Thayer professor. That meeting of the minds led Trembly to start Avedro, a company that offers a less invasive alternative to Lasik. “Avedro,” says Trembly, “treated its first patients last spring using the microwave technology that came directly out of the original discussions with Ralph.”

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

AN EYE FOR THE EYE: Ralph Crump’s cold and hot ways for surgeons to treat vision problems include his patented cryosurgical instrument. Image courtesy of freepatentsonline.com/3393679.pdf.

Co-inventor: Professor Paul E. Queneau

LEADER OF THE PACK: A QSL reactor, co-invented by Professor Paul E. Queneau, produces 150,000 tons of lead and lead alloys and 100,000 tons of sulphuric acid annually at the Berzelius plant in Stolberg, Germany. Photograph courtesy of Berzelius Stolberg GmbH.

When the National Academy of Engineering honored Professor Paul E. Queneau with membership in 1981, the citation noted his “innovative leadership in the invention and commercial development of efficient technology for extraction of nickel, copper, and cobalt.” In the world of smelting, he’s also known for getting the lead out.

Queneau devoted his entire career to metal. During the Depression, the Columbia grad labored at the International Nickel Company’s (INCO) alloy furnaces in West Virginia. “It was hard, dangerous work,” he says, but metallurgy hooked him, and he moved up in the company.

Army service — he rose to colonel — in the European theater during World War II galvanized him. “What I saw and experienced over there has driven me ever since,” he says. “Who do you think designed all those tools of mass destruction? It was engineers! We as engineers now have a responsibility to modernize technology, save energy, and protect the environment.”

Returning to R&D at INCO, Queneau helped develop energy-efficient, environmentally friendly smelters with breakthrough oxygen technology that reduced the needed amount of coal and decreased sulfur emissions.

Professor Paul E. Queneau in 2008. Photograph by Mark Woodward.

Soon after becoming a professor at Thayer School in 1971, Queneau joined with Purdue University Professor Reinhart Schuhmann Jr. and the German firm Lurgi to invent a continuous smelter that boosts efficiency and cleanliness. Compacted pellets of sulphide concentrate and flue dust dissolve in a molten bath that is injected with oxygen, producing lead and lead oxide. The lead sinks to the bottom and is siphoned off. The lead oxide flows to the far end of the reactor. Along the way, submerged injectors blow powdered coal into the lead oxide to reduce it to lead. Sulphur dioxide in the off-gas is converted to commercially usable sulphuric acid. Remaining flue dust is mixed into new pellets, and the process starts again.

Queneau Schuhmann Lurgi, a.k.a. QSL, reactors are in use in Canada, Korea, and Germany, churning out lead without spurning the environment.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set on Flickr.

Co-inventor: Professor Frank Austin

By Lee Michaelides

X-RAY VISION: Frank Austin, class of 1895, x-rayed his own hand. Photograph courtesy of New Hampshire Profiles magazine.

The medical X-ray, like many inventions, is the result of different people working simultaneously on the same idea. Weeks after German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen announced in late 1895 the discovery of a “mysterious light” emitted from Crookes tubes, scientists and engineers from all over the world began experiments. One such person was Frank Austin, class of 1895, a physics assistant at Dartmouth and later a professor at Thayer. Using equipment he built, Austin made a number of X-ray photographs, including one of his own hand in late January of 1896. On February 3, 1896, at Austin’s suggestion, Hanover physician Dr. Gilman Frost and his brother, physics professor Edwin Frost, took a diagnostic X-ray of local schoolboy Eddie McCarthy’s broken wrist.

Until recently, Dartmouth had undisputed bragging rites for the first medical X-ray. Then Yale claimed that one of its physicists made an X-ray image on January 27, 1896.

“If Yale’s physicist, Arthur Wright, preempted the Dartmouth group,” writes Dr. Peter Spiegel ’58 DMS’59, a Dartmouth radiologist who has done extensive research on the history of the X-ray, “it remains unreported and unsubstantiated, at least in the scientific literature. The Dartmouth group went one step further. The taking of the first clinical X-ray in America was captured by photographer Henry H. Barrett and so remains the first scientific experiment recorded by photographic means.”

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

Editor’s Note: The photograph to which Dr. Spiegel refers actually was taken by H.H. Langill with the assistance of Henry H. Barrett.

Frank Austin urged Dr. Gilman Frost to take the first medical X-ray. Left to right: physicist Edwin Frost, patient Eddie McCarthy, Gilman Frost, and Gilman’s wife, Margaret Mead Frost. Photograph by H.H. Langill and Henry H. Barrett; from Dartmouth College Archives.

LIFESAVERS: The Kantrowitz brothers, Adrian, left, and Arthur, right, helped heart patients. Photograph by Ralph Morse/Time & Life Pictures.

Inventors: Professor Arthur Kantrowitz and Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz

A dynamic duo for solving problems of engineering in medicine, Thayer professor Arthur Kantrowitz and his brother Adrian learned early on that Arthur’s passion for physics and Adrian’s interest in medicine could combine into a powerful force for innovation.

As kids they built an electrocardiograph machine out of old radio parts, and later — when Adrian became a doctor and Arthur a professor of engineering physics — they paved the way for open-heart surgery with their early version of a heart-lung machine. Their projects together continued from there. They developed a left ventricular assist device, introduced electrical stimulation of paralyzed muscles, pioneered the implantable pacemaker, and invented the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP).

IABP is a small balloon that fits in the aorta and counter-pulsates with the heart. This action both decreases myocardial oxygen demand and increases myocardial oxygen supply. A computer controls the flow of helium into and out of the balloon. Helium is used because its low viscosity allows it to travel quickly through the long connecting tubes and lowers the risk of rupturing the balloon and causing a harmful embolism.

The IABP is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. The device was used on Arthur himself to ease the effects of heart failure during his final hours. Both brothers died in November 2008, just 15 days apart. [See In Memoriam.]

—Catharine Lamm

For more photos, visit our Engineering in Medicine, Faculty and Instructors, and Research and Innovations Flickr page.

PEDAL TO THE MEDAL: Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05, in red shirt, and his Aquaduct colleagues created a winner. Photo courtesy of Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

Inventor: Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

In many parts of the world, people have to walk or motor miles to collect water. Then they have to boil it to purify it. The process not only consumes time but fuels.

Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05 and four colleagues at IDEO, a design firm in Palo Alto, Calif., came up with a better idea. They invented the “Aquaduct,” a mobile filtration vehicle that makes it possible for people in the developing world to fetch and transport a family’s daily supply of water. By the time riders pedal home, some of the water is already filtered and ready to drink. The rest can be filtered later by stationary cycling.

The idea was so good that it recently won the grand prize in Google’s first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest, which challenged teams across the country to create pedal-powered solutions to offset climate change. The Aquaduct beat out 101 other entries.

The ingenious bike attaches a peristaltic pump to the pedal crank to draw water from a large tank and filter it into a removable dispenser. Mason says that the project reminded him of Thayer School’s hands-on introductory course. “It was like working on ENGS 21 but in the real world,” he says.

Mason and his teammates donated their $5,000 prize money to KickStart, a nonprofit that develops and markets new low-cost technologies in Africa.

The bike hasn’t yet made it into production, but Mason is hopeful. “We are working to find funding to continue the project, as it needs more development,” he says. “It has received lots of press and excitement from around the world.”

More than 750,000 people have already watched the team’s winning presentation of the Aquaduct on YouTube.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Loomis rowed the Connecticut River his own way.

Inventor: Warren Loomis ’62 Th’65

By Lee Michaelides

No doubt about it: Warren Loomis ’62 Th’65 was a forwarding-looking guy. In the early 1960s, when there were exactly two computers at Dartmouth, he took a keen interest in the new technology. After his first employer, the pioneering Time Share Corp., downsized him out of a job, he formed his own software company, Logic Associates. The two-man outfit soon became a Loomis-only enterprise as the company struggled to find its niche. But Loomis persevered, and a quarter century later the Upper Valley-based firm had 120 employees and sales of $17 million. He sold the company in 2000, and turned his engineering skills to recreation.

Loomis had taken up rowing, and he thought rowers should see where they were going, not where they’d already been. He designed a rowboat that combines the motion of a rowing machine with a rear-mounted propeller. Then he and his sons, Aaron and Jason, founded the Faceforward! company to manufacture and sell the novel craft. Next he developed a set of real-time performance tools to measure speed, power, and efficiency in small boats.

By the time Loomis died last November, neither of his rowing innovations matched the financial success of his software start-up. But they illustrate what son Jason says was a favorite saying of the late inventor: “The guy with the most tries wins.”

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Strohbehn, left, and Roberts launched image-guided surgery with their breakthrough operating microscope.

Inventors: Professor John Strohbehn and Dr. David Roberts DMS’75

Ever since early humans drilled holes into patients’ heads in paleolithic neurosurgery, doctors have longed for a way to navigate the brain and pinpoint lesions. In the 1970s computerized tomography (CT) produced amazing two-dimensional images of the brain, but the only way to use the scans as navigational guides during surgery was via a cumbersome metal frame that ringed the patient’s head, got in the surgeon’s way, and (ouch!) had to be screwed directly into the skull.

In the early 1980s Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center neurosurgeon David Roberts DMS’75 asked Thayer Professor John Strohbehn to create a better solution: an instrument that could map CT data onto the visual field of a microscope to produce a precise three-dimensional (a.k.a. stereotactic) view of the brain. Working together in Strohbehn’s lab at 7 a.m. — before Roberts’ clinical hours and Strohbehn’s classes — they created an operating microscope that was stereotactic, frameless, and precise. They tested their prototype in the operating room in 1983 and patented the invention three years later.

The frameless stereotactic operating microscope was a hit. Not only was it more comfortable for the patient, it was the beginning of image-guided surgery.

Today every neurosurgical operating room in the world is equipped with an updated version of Strohbehn and Roberts’ invention. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that brain surgery would now be unthinkable without it.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Inventor: Professor Fred Hooven ’25A

Professor Fred Hooven ’25A. Photograph by Douglas Fraser.

In a memorial tribute to Professor Fred Hooven ’25A, former Thayer School Dean Myron Tribus described Hooven as a classical engineer who “viewed the world’s problems in terms of their potential solutions.” Hooven spent his career solving many problems for science, commerce and fun.

Born in 1905, Hooven grew up in Dayton, Ohio, not far from the Wright brothers. At 5 he befriended Orville. At 15 he sought his advice on building planes. Years later, Hooven used the Wrights’ wind tunnel data to design a paper airplane that beat 10,000 other entries in the “duration aloft” category of Scientific American’s Great American Paper Airplane Contest.

Hooven, an MIT grad, invented many devices for airplanes, including a radio compass that is still in use. He designed a short-wave radar system for bombers during World War II and invented ignition and landing systems for other planes. Turning to other fields, he developed brake shoes used in all GM vehicles for 25 years and a front-wheel drive system installed in several GM models. He even invented the first successful heart-lung machine. By the time he died in 1985, he held 38 patents in avionics, automotive technology, and medical technology.

Amelia Earhart holds the radio compass she used in 1937 on her last flight. Hooven, wished she had taken the one he invented. Photograph courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections.

Hooven became a legend, however, not because of who used his inventions, but because of someone who didn’t.

“Before Miss Earhart took off on her Round-the-World flight she removed from her plane a modern radio compass that had been installed and replaced it with an older, lighter-weight model of much less capability. I am the engineer who had invented and developed the radio compass that was removed, and I discussed its features with Miss Earhart before the installation was made,” wrote Hooven in a scholarly paper published in 1982 about Amelia Earhart’s final flight. To the end he believed that had she used his radio compass she would have found Howland Island — and a safe landing.

—Lee Michaelides