Clark Johnson says he has wished to be a scientist ever since he was 3. At age 8, he obtained uninterested in a telegraph-building package he acquired as a present and repurposed it right into a phone. By age 12, he set his sights on learning physics as a result of he wished to grasp how issues labored on the most simple degree.
“I assumed, mistakenly on the time, that physicists had been attuned to the left ear of God,” Johnson says.
Clark Johnson
Employer
Wave Area
Title
CFO
Member grade
Life Fellow
After graduating at age 19 with a bachelor’s diploma in physics in 1950 from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he was planning to go to graduate college when he obtained a name from the top of the physics part at 3M’s R&D laboratory with a job provide. Tempted by the promise of doing issues along with his personal fingers, Johnson accepted the function of physicist on the firm’s facility in St. Paul, Minn. Thus started his greater than seven-decade-long profession as {an electrical} engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur—which continues to at the present time.
Johnson, an IEEE Life Fellow, is an energetic member of the IEEE Magnetics Society and served as its 1983–1984 president.
He was on the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, after which was recruited by the Superior Analysis Tasks Company (ARPA) and assigned to help in MIT’s Research Program on Communications Policy, the place he contributed to the event of HDTV.
He went on to assist discovered Wave Domain in Monson, Mass. Johnson and his Wave Area collaborators have been granted six patents for his or her newest invention, a standing-wave storage (SWS) system that homes archival knowledge in a low-energy-use, tamper-proof manner utilizing antiquated pictures know-how.
3M, HDTV, and a profession stuffed with coloration
3M turned out to be fertile floor for Johnson’s creativity.
“You can spend 15 p.c of your time engaged on belongings you preferred,” he says. “The president of the corporate believed that new concepts type of sprung out of nothing, and for those who poked round, you would possibly come throughout one thing that could possibly be helpful.”
Johnson’s poking round led him to contribute to creating an audio tape cartridge and Scotchlite, the reflective movie seen on roads, indicators, and extra.
In 1989 he was tapped to be an IEEE Congressional Fellow. He selected to work with Rep. George Brown Jr., a Democrat representing the forty second district in central California. Brown was a rating member of the Home committee on science, space, and technology, which oversees nearly all non-defense and non-health associated analysis.
“It was in all probability essentially the most thrilling yr of my complete life,” Johnson says.
Whereas on the science committee, he met Richard Jay Solomon, who was affiliate director of MIT’s Analysis Program on Communications Coverage, testifying for the committee on video and telecom points. Solomon’s background is numerous. He studied physics and electrical engineering within the early Nineteen Sixties at Brooklyn Polytechnic and basic science at New York University. Earlier than changing into a analysis affiliate at MIT in 1969, he held quite a lot of positions. He ran {a magazine} about scientific pictures, and he based a enterprise that supplied consulting on city planning and transportation. He authored 4 textbooks on transportation planning, three of which had been printed by the American Society of Civil Engineers. On the journal, Solomon gained insights into arcane, long-forgotten Nineteenth-century photographic processes that turned out to be helpful in future innovations.
Johnson and Solomon bonded over their shared curiosity in trains. Johnson’s refurbished Pullman automobile has traveled some 850,000 miles throughout the continental U.S.Clark Johnson
Johnson and Solomon clicked over a shared curiosity in trains. On the time they met, Johnson owned a railway automobile that was parked within the District of Columbia’s Union Station, and he used it to maneuver all through North America, touring some 850,000 miles earlier than promoting the automobile in 2019. Johnson and Solomon shared many journeys aboard the refurbished Pullman automobile.
Now they’re collaborators on a brand new technique to retailer massive knowledge in a tamperproof, zero-energy-cost medium.
Standard storage units akin to solid-state drives and onerous disks take vitality to take care of, and so they would possibly degrade over time, however Johnson says the approach he, Solomon, and collaborators developed requires just about no vitality and might stay intact for hundreds of years underneath most circumstances.
Lengthy earlier than collaborating on their newest undertaking, Johnson and Solomon teamed up on one other high-profile endeavor: the event of HDTV. The undertaking arose by their work on the congressional science committee.
Within the late Nineteen Eighties, engineers in Japan had been engaged on creating an analog high-definition tv system.
“My boss on the science committee mentioned, ‘We actually can’t let the Japanese do that. There’s all this digital know-how and digital computer systems. We’ve obtained to do that digitally,’” Johnson says.
That spawned a collaborative undertaking funded by NASA and ARPA (the predecessor of modern-day DARPA). After Johnson’s tenure on the science committee ended, he and Solomon joined a staff at MIT that participated within the collaboration. As they developed what would develop into the dominant TV know-how, Johnson and Solomon turned specialists in optics. Working with Polaroid, IBM, and Philips in 1992, the staff demonstrated the world’s first digital, progressive-scanned, high-definition camera on the annual National Association of Broadcastersconvention.
A serendipitous discovery
Round 2000, Clark and Solomon, together with a brand new colleague, Eric Rosenthal, started working as impartial consultants to NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Rosenthal had been a vice chairman of analysis and growth at Walt Disney Imagineering and basic supervisor of audiovisual techniques engineering at ABC television previous to becoming a member of forces with Clark and Solomon.
Whereas engaged on one DARPA-funded undertaking, Solomon stumbled upon a web page in a century-old optics textbook that caught his eye. It described a way developed by famous physicist Gabriel Lippmann for producing color photographs. As an alternative of utilizing movie or dyes, Lippmann created photographs through the use of a glass plate coated with a specifically formulated silver halide emulsion.
When uncovered to a vibrant, sunlit scene, the complete spectrum of sunshine mirrored off a mercury-based mirror coating on the again of the glass. It created standing waves contained in the emulsion layer of the colours detected. The silver grains within the brightest components of the standing wave turned oxidized, as if remembering the exact colours they noticed. (It was in stark distinction to conventional coloration images and tv, which retailer solely purple, inexperienced, and blue components of the spectrum.) Then, chemical processing turned the oxidized silver halide grains black, leaving the sunshine waves imprinted within the medium in a manner that’s almost not possible to tamper with. Lippmann acquired the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.
Lippmann’s pictures approach didn’t garner business success, as a result of there was no sensible approach to duplicate the photographs or print them. And on the time, the emulsions wanted the sunshine to be extraordinarily vibrant to be correctly imprinted within the medium.
However, Solomon was impressed with the sturdiness of the ensuing picture. He defined the method to his colleagues, who acknowledged the potential for utilizing the approach to retailer info for archival functions. Johnson noticed Lippmann’s old photographs on the Museum for Photography, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the place he observed that the colours appeared clear and intense regardless of being greater than a century previous.
The silver halide technique caught with Solomon, and in 2013 he and Johnson returned to Lippmann’s emulsion pictures approach.
“We obtained to speaking about how we might take all this info we knew about coloration and use it for one thing,” Johnson says.
Information in area and on land
Whereas Rosenthal was visiting the International Space Station headquarters in Montgomery, Ala., in 2013, a high scientist mentioned, “‘The info saved on the station will get erased each 24 hours by cosmic rays,’” Rosenthal recollects. “‘And we now have to maintain rewriting the information over and over and over.’” Cosmic rays and photo voltaic flares can harm digital elements, inflicting errors or outright erasures on onerous disks and different conventional knowledge storage techniques.
Rosenthal, Johnson, and Solomon knew that correctly processed silver halide images can be resistant to such hazards, together with electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions. The staff examined Lippmann’s photographic emulsion anew.
Solomon’s son, Brian Solomon, an expert photographer and a specialist in making photographic emulsions, additionally was involved in regards to the sturdiness of typical dye-based coloration images, which have a tendency to begin fading after a couple of many years.
The staff got here up with an intriguing thought: Given how sturdy Lippmann’s images seemed to be, what if they might use an identical approach—not for making analog pictures however for storing digital knowledge? Thus started their latest engineering endeavor: altering how archival knowledge—knowledge that doesn’t must be overwritten however merely preserved and browse sometimes—is saved.
The standing wave storage approach works by shining vibrant LEDs onto a specifically formulated emulsion of silver grains in gelatin. The sunshine displays off the substrate layer (which could possibly be air), and varieties standing waves within the emulsion. Standing waves oxidize the silver grains at their peaks, and a chemical course of turns the oxidized silver grains black, imprinting the sample of colours into the medium. Wave Area
Conventionally saved knowledge typically is protected by making a number of copies or repeatedly rewriting it, Johnson says. The strategies require vitality, although, and might be labor-intensive.
The quantity of information that must be saved on land can also be rising by leaps and bounds. The marketplace for knowledge facilities and different artificial intelligence infrastructure is rising at an annual fee of 44 p.c, in accordance with Data Bridge Market Research. Generally used hard drives and solid-state drives consume some power, even when they aren’t in use. The drives’ standby energy consumption varies between 0.05 and a pair of.5 watts per drive. And knowledge facilities comprise an infinite variety of drives requiring large quantities of electrical energy to maintain operating.
Johnson estimates that about 25 p.c of the information held in at this time’s knowledge facilities is archival in nature, that means it won’t must be overwritten.
The ‘write as soon as, learn perpetually’ know-how
The know-how Johnson, Solomon, and their collaborators have developed guarantees to beat the vitality necessities and vulnerabilities of conventional knowledge storage for archival functions.
The design builds off of Lippmann’s thought. As an alternative of taking an analog {photograph}, the staff divided the medium into pixels. With the assistance of emulsion specialist Yves Gentet, they labored to enhance Lippmann’s emulsion chemistry, making it extra delicate and able to storing a number of wavelengths at every pixel location. The ultimate emulsion is a mix of silver halide and intensely hardened gelatin. Their approach now can retailer as much as 4 distinct narrow-band, superimposed colours in every pixel.
The standing wave storage approach can retailer as much as 4 colours out of a potential 32 at every pixel location. This provides as much as an astounding storage capability of 4.6 terabits (or roughly 300 motion pictures) within the space of a single {photograph}. Wave Area
“The textbooks say that’s not possible,” Solomon says, “however we did it, so the textbooks are mistaken.”
For every pixel, they will select 4 colours out of a potential 32 to retailer.
That quantities to greater than 40,000 prospects. Thus, the approach can retailer greater than 40,000 bits (though the format needn’t be binary) in every 10-square-micrometer pixel, or 4.6 terabits in a ten.16 centimeter by 12.7 cm modified Lippmann plate. That’s greater than 300 motion pictures’ price of information saved in a single image.
To jot down on the SWS medium, the plate—coated with a skinny layer of the specifically formulated emulsion—is uncovered to mild from an array of highly effective coloration LEDs.
That manner, your complete plate is written concurrently, drastically decreasing the writing time per pixel.
The plate then will get developed by a chemical course of that blackens the uncovered silver grains, memorizing the waves of coloration it was uncovered to.
Lastly, a small charged-couplet-device digicam array, like these utilized in cellphones, reads out the data. The readout happens for your complete plate without delay, so the readout fee, just like the writing fee, is quick.
“The info that we learn is coming off the plate at such a excessive bandwidth,” Solomon says. “There is no such thing as a laptop on the planet that may take up it with out some buffering.”
The complete reminiscence cell is a sandwich of the LED array, the photosensitive plate, and the CCD. All the weather use off-the-shelf components.
“We took a very long time to determine how one can make this in a really cheap, reproducible, fast manner,” Johnson says. “The concept is to make use of available components.” The complete storage medium, together with its learn/write infrastructure, is comparatively cheap and transportable.
To check the sturdiness of their storage technique, the staff despatched their collaborators at NASA some 150 samples of their SWS units to be hung by astronauts outdoors the Worldwide House Station for 9 months in 2019. They then examined the integrity of the saved knowledge after the SWS plates had been returned from area, in contrast with one other 150 plates saved in Rosenthal’s lab on the bottom.
“There was completely zero degradation from 9 months of publicity to cosmic rays,” Solomon says. In the meantime, the plates on Rosenthal’s desk had been crawling with micro organism, whereas the ISS plates had been sterile. Silver is a identified bactericide, although, so the colours had been immune, Solomon says.
Their most up-to-date patent, granted earlier this yr, describes a way of storing knowledge that requires no energy to take care of when not actively studying or writing knowledge. Staff members say the approach is incorruptible: It’s resistant to moisture, photo voltaic flares, cosmic rays, and other forms of radiation. So, they argue, it may be used each in area and on land as a sturdy, low-cost archival knowledge resolution.
Passing on the torch
The brand new invention has large potential functions. Along with knowledge facilities and area functions, Johnson says, scientific enterprises such because the Rubin Observatory being in-built Chile, will produce large quantities of archival knowledge that might profit from SWS know-how.
“It’s all reference knowledge, and it’s a unprecedented quantity of information that’s being generated each week that must be saved perpetually,” Johnson says.
Johnson says, nevertheless, that he and his staff won’t be those to carry the know-how to market: “I’m 94 years previous, and my two companions are of their 70s and 80s. We’re not about to begin an organization.”
He is able to go on the torch. The staff is in search of a brand new chief govt to go up Wave Area, which they hope will proceed the event of SWS and convey it to mass adoption.
Johnson says he has discovered that folks not often know which new applied sciences will ultimately have essentially the most impression. Maybe, although few individuals understand it now, storing massive knowledge utilizing previous photographic know-how will develop into an sudden success.
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