George Harold Brown  George Harold Brown (14 October 1908 – 11 December 1987) was an American research engineer. He was a prolific inventor who held more than 80 patents and wrote over 100 technical papers. He led the RCA Corporation's efforts to develop a color television system which is still in use today. He was associated with the RCA for over forty years, becoming an executive vice president for research and engineering in November 1961. Brown's father, a railway employee, was of Scottish descent, his mother's family was German. He attended high school at Portage, Wisconsin. As a schoolboy he was already experimenting with constructing his own crystal-detector receiver. After graduation he studied electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was still only a college junior when he spent a summer in the Test Department at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. He won two highly competitive graduate fellowships and received a B.S. (1930), an M.S. (1931) and a Ph.D. (1933) for his work on broadcast antennas and ground systems. In 1933 Brown joined RCA at Camden, New Jersey, where he conducted research into AM broadcasting antennas that became standard throughout the world. In 1935 a commission to produce an antenna with omnidirectional radiation, i.e. equal at all points of the compass, led him to develop the turnstile antenna, so-called because it looked like a turnstile. This offered an effective combination of high gain and broad bandwidth with a wave propagation pattern that made it possible to broadcast FM radio and television signals over long distances. To this design he later added an absorbing resistor which resulted in increased bandwidth and permitted the simultaneous radiation of television pictures and sound from the same antenna. In 1939 he produced a device for enabling high resolution of broadcast television. He named it the "vestigial side-band filter". It was accepted in January 1939 by the Federal Communications Commission for broadcasting throughout the USA, and it is used throughout the world today. He moved to the new central research laboratories of the RCA at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1942. By this time he was developing radio and radar antennas for military systems. He was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation from the War Department for his contributions. He and his colleagues developed a method for speeding the production of penicillin by means of radio-frequency heating techniques. Using inexpensive vacuum pumps and simple condensers it was estimated to be about one-tenth of the cost of freeze drying.