George Harry Heilmeier was born May 22, 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to receive his M.S.E., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in solid-state elec­tron­ics from Princeton University. Heilmeier joined RCA Laboratories’ David Sarnoff Research Center in 1958 and worked on many projects includ­ing electro-optic effects in mol­e­c­u­lar and liq­uid crystals.

In 1962, Richard Williams found liq­uid crys­tals to have an electro-optical effect when a volt­age was applied to a thin layer of liq­uid crys­tal mate­r­ial. This effect is called “Williams domains” and effect that is based on an electro-hydrodynamic insta­bil­ity form­ing in the liq­uid crys­tal mate­r­ial. Two years later in 1964, Heilmeier dis­cov­ered new electro-optic effects in liq­uid crys­tals based on the dynamic scat­ter­ing mode (DSM) that led to the world’s first work­ing liq­uid crystal-based dis­play. The DSM LCD worked by apply­ing an elec­tri­cal charge that rearranges the liq­uid crys­tals which then scat­tered light. Heilmeier was pre­sented with the pres­ti­gious IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 1976 (MIT incor­rectly stated the year as 1968) for his excep­tional con­tri­bu­tion to elec­tron­ics. (Source: Wikipedia, MIT)

The pic­ture above shows George Heilmeier with the first dynamic scat­ter­ing method-based liq­uid crys­tal display.

In 1966, Heilmeier and Richard Williams pub­lished an arti­cle titled “Possible Ferroelectric Effects in Liquid Crystals and Related Liquids” in the Journal of Chemical Physics, 44:638. Heilmeier’s lab group, which included Nunzio Luce, Louis Zanoni, Joel Goldmacher, Joseph Castellano and Lucian Barton, began inves­ti­gat­ing the use of LCDs for TV appli­ca­tions but soon real­ized it would take con­sid­er­able time and refo­cused their research on dig­i­tal time dis­plays for clocks and watches.

The very first liq­uid crys­tal dis­play for com­mer­cial appli­ca­tions was devel­oped in 1970. Luce, Zanoni, George Graham, and Goldmacher left RCA and joined Optel Corporation and it was there the first LCD was developed.

At about the same time in 1969, James Fergason at Kent Sate invented a dif­fer­ent type of LCD that was based on the twisted nematic field effect. Fergason left Kent State and formed ILIXCO Corporation to com­mer­cial­ize his ver­sion of the LCD that con­sumed less power, had improved life­times with good con­trast com­pared to the dynamic scat­ter­ing mode LCD. In 1972 the first com­mer­cial prod­uct with a twisted nematic field effect LCD, an ILIXCO dis­play, was intro­duced: Gruen’s Teletime LCD Watch. The Teletime had just one func­tion: telling time. The lit­tle knob on the right is used to adjust the time. The orig­i­nal price back in 1972 was an incred­i­bly expen­sive $200. You could have got­ten a MG Midget Convertible for $2550 in 1972! (Image source: Pocket Calculator Show)

On May 2, 2009 (that’s tomor­row), Heilmeier along with 15 oth­ers includ­ing Andy Grove and Alfred Cho (mol­e­c­u­lar beam epi­taxy used for form­ing LEDs, tran­sis­tors, etc.) will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame founded by the US Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations in 1973. Heilmeier will also be cred­ited with being the inven­tory of the LCD. Other inductees include Thomas Edison, Dean Kamen and Steve Wozniak. Heilmeier has won many prizes and most recently was awarded the Kyoto Prize for advanced tech­nol­ogy in 2005.

“When we built sev­eral pro­to­type dis­plays we thought it would be great for shower doors,” shared Heilmeier dur­ing an inter­view with Wired.com. That seems like a good idea! Heilmeier is cur­rently Chairman Emeritus at Telcordia Technologies, a Piscataway, New Jersey-based com­pany pro­vid­ing fixed, mobile and broad­band com­mu­ni­ca­tions soft­ware and services.