Inventor Name
ITT Industrial Research Laboratories
Repository
National Museum of American History
Smithsonian Institution
Archives Center
P.O. Box 37012
MRC 601/Room 1100
Washington, DC 20013-7012
202-633-3270http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives
Physical Description
3.5 cu. ft. : 9 boxes.
Summary
Incorporated and founded in 1920 by Sosthenes Behn and his brother Hernand Behn as a telephone and telegraph company, ITT expanded and established facilities both in the United States and throughout the world. The Fort Wayne, Indiana facility resulted when Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, who had set up the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, sold his company to ITT in 1949. The laboratories in Fort Wayne were responsible for developing new technical concepts, methods and designs of tubes, sensors and devices for application in industrial, government and commercial markets. Laboratory activities included applied research, advanced development and product design, and development and fabrication. They concentrated their efforts on designing and developing components which operated in the infrared, visible, and ultraviolet portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. They were innovators in developing a number of specialized high vacuum devices including: image dissectors, star tracking dissectors and multiplier phototubes, single quantum counting photomultipliers, grid-controlled photomultipliers, biplanar and laser monitoring photodiodes, windowless electron multipliers and single particle detectors, ultraviolet sensitive photodiodes, image converters, image storage and image correlation tubes, and spectral response information. This collection contains a diverse selection of materials that address a variety of aspects of the ITT Industrial Laboratories in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There are research and development notebooks from various scientists and engineers, reports and articles on products being developed and research being conducted, technical drawings, a large body of product information, and photographs of products and research projects. People represented in the collection include: George Papp, Hans W.G. Salinger, Philo T. Farnsworth, Madison Cawein, Robert L. Hirsch, Sanford F. Essig, H.J. Lott, and Edward H. Eberhardt. When these materials came to the Archives Center a portion of them were housed in envelopes with captions written on them. The envelopes were photocopied to preserve the information and the contents were incorporated into the above series in order to facilitate intellectual access to the materials.
