Dr. Louis N. Ridenour

A physicist instrumental in U.S. development of radar, he was Vice President of Lockheed, and an advisor to President Eisenhower. In 1941 he became the assistant director of the MIT Radiation Laboratory and was a co-leader with Ivan A. Getting of the group that developed the SCR-584, a microwave radar nicknamed "Micky" which allowed bombing through clouds. This replaced the earlier and much more complex SCR-268 as the US Army's primary anti-aircraft gun laying system. He was the first chief scientist of the Air Force and served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground. In 1946 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania for one year and then in 1947 he became dean of the Graduate College of the University of Illinois. During the next three years as dean, he was instrumental in establishing the Control Systems Laboratory, the Digital Computer Laboratory, and the Radio Carbon Laboratory, as well as a microbiology group and solid state group. He was Chairman of the National Security Agency Scientific Advisory Board Panel on Electronics and Data Processing from its inception on January 27, 1959 until his death in May of that year. He received the Theodore von Karman Award, posthumously by the Air Force Association in 1960. Along with Gilbert W. King, Edwin L. Hughes, and George W. Brown, he patented an information storage system which combined optical disk storage of large capacity and a magnetic drum memory of low capacity. The write-once-read-many optical disk memory would be updated monthly, and recently changed data is held on the re-writable magnetic drum memory.