Society's top honors freeze out electronics

It's never too late to achieve recognition for invention or innovation. Just look at the 2005 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (Link 1). They include Clarence Birdseye of frozen-food fame and Matthias Baldwin, who was the first American to mass-produce high-quality steam locomotives. Baldwin died in 1866, and Birdseye died in 1956.

This month, the National Inventors Hall of Fame (Akron, OH) will induct 14 inventors, of whom only two fall into anything resembling an electronics category: Robert Gundlach, who at Xerox revolutionized copying machines, and C Donald Bateman, who invented the ground-proximity warning system for alerting pilots when they're too close to water or land.

Few organizations celebrate contemporary innovation in electronics on the level of a Nobel Prize or the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which the US Patent and Trademark Office sponsors. One can argue that years if not decades must pass before we can accurately measure the impact of an invention. But Birdseye and Baldwin in 2005?

Neither the Nobel Prize nor the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which goes under the banner "Invent Now," have categories in electronics or subtopics, such as systems, semiconductors, or components. Invent Now dances all around electronics with computer, communications, imaging, and electricity categories. Nonetheless, without electronics, we wouldn't be talking about communications, computers, and imaging.

The Nobel Foundation sticks electronics inventors, such as John Bardeen, Walter Brittain, and William Shockley, into the physics category; however, when they became laureates in 1956 for inventing the transistor (and Bardeen again in 1972 for work in superconductivity), electronics was scarcely on the tip of our tongues.

Electronics inventors have only twice during the past 20 years won the Nobel Prize in physics. Zhores I Alferov; Herbert Kroemer, who will address an IEEE meeting in October; and Jack Kilby shared the prize in 2002 (Link 2). And in 1987, two IBMers—J Georg Bednorz and K Alexander Müller—were co-winners for their work in superconductivity (Link 3).

So what does US society truly value? With the exception of Gordon Moore in 2002, no scientist, researcher, engineer, or inventor has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the past 12 years, although plenty of TV stars and athletes have (Link 4).

Of course, museums, universities, government agencies, and organizations such as the IEEE widely celebrate electronics innovations, handing out plenty of prizes, awards, grant moneys, fellowships, and scholarships. And EDN has its own Innovation Awards, for which $10,000 annually goes to the school of the top innovator's choice. But no one seems to value electronics as a distinct category at the highest recognition levels. I think the category deserves more recognition. Let me know what you think.

Write me at john.dodge@reedbusiness.com.