Talk:Edward Eisner

Edward Eisner remembered

As his son, I’d like to add a few details, but I have no references.

Edward was the son of sugar engineer Josef (known as “Bob”) Eisner and Veronika (known as “Vera”) Eisner, née Goldschmied. The family came to England in 1938, where Josef got a job with Maurice Fletcher (manufacturers of sugar refining machinery), and later with Bookers. He (Josef) later invented the Eisner Boiler, still known to engineers in the boiler and sugar industries.

Edward attended Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge and stayed to do a PhD on the physics of thin films, under the supervision of Jeof Courtney-Pratt, who was later responsible for inviting Edward to work at Bell Labs.

Before leaving for the States, Edward worked at the Safety in Mines Research Establishment in Buxton, married Diane Mary Race in May 1958, and I was born ten months later. My sister Rowan was born in 1964, followed by Gillian (1966-91).

As well as cordless handsets, Edward worked on early software for tracking of celestial objects, and worked with a team charged with finding a way to track the new telecommunications satellite Telstar, without adding significantly to its payload. Their solution was to cover the satellite in small mirrors to make it highly reflective, so that it could be tracked visually. I suspect the mirrored disco balls popular in the 70s were inspired by this - at least one disco outfit was called “Telstar”!

Edward also worked on the acoustics of horns, and found the first analytic solution to the Webster Horn Equation.

His work on telecommunications inevitably led him to study information theory, and he repeatedly (but unsuccessfully) proposed its inventor Claude Shannon for a Nobel Prize.

- James Eisner JamesEis (talk) 01:11, 4 October 2019 (UTC)