I've been thinking about fathers and mothers quite a bit lately. Not necessarily the parents of human children, but those who brought a big idea into the world. Women like Hedy Lamar and Harriett Tubman. Men like Thomas Stockham and Philo Farnsworth.

First I thought about Thomas Stockham, the father of digital recording. I heard him lecture here at the University of Utah in the early 70's as he started to experiment with digital restoration of Enrico Caruso recordings. Now as I listen to Caruso on CD (or any CD for that matter), or edit audio on the desktop, it seems fitting to remember Stockham.

Next Philo Farnsworth came to mind. Probably because of a Doug Fabrizio interview on KUER with Dan Stashower, author of The Boy Genius and the Mogel, The Untold Story of Television. I also remember the way producer Kirk Strickland used Farnsworth's medium to portray a young Philo in a public service announcement for Pioneer, Utah's Online Library.

To be honest about it, Lamar and Tubman weren't top-of-mind names to me. I found them browsing Women Inventors online. You could call Hedy Lamar the mother of spread spectrum cryptography. She titled it A Secret Communications System in her 1942 patent. The impact today? Pagers, cellular phones, Internet bandwidth and military anti-jamming devices.

About Tubman. Last night at the dinner table I posed this trivia quiz, "Who is Harriet Tubman?" To my delight our sixth grader nailed it in about 15 seconds, "Didn't she start the underground railroad?" But course what Tubman "invented" wasn't at all trivial.

A few related resources at UEN include Ideas, Invention and Communication at Themepark, Civil War Newspaper in Lesson Plans and in the UEN Rubric Tool.

"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals."
--Marie Curie

Found while looking for something else: 1959 Geloso G256

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