Herbert Eugene Ives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Eugene_Ives

Herbert Eugene Ives (July 21, 1882, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 13, 1953) was a scientist and engineer who headed the development of facsimile and television systems at AT&T in the first half of the twentieth century. Following the philosophy of Lorentz, he attempted to demonstrate the physical reality of relativistic effects by means of logical arguments and experiments. He is best known for the Ives–Stilwell experiment, which provided direct confirmation of special relativity's time dilation factor.

Biography

Ives studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1908. He wrote a 1920 book on aerial photography, while an Army reserve officer, in the aviation section. Ives was also an avid coin collector, and was President of the American Numismatic Society. He was president of the Optical Society of America from 1924 to 1925 and was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal in 1937.

Like his father Frederic Eugene Ives, Herbert was an expert on color photography. In 1924, he transmitted and reconstructed the first color facsimile, using color separations. In 1927, he demonstrated 185-line long-distance television, transmitting the live video image of then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover from AT&T's experimental station 3XN in Whippany, New Jersey.

By 1930, his 'two-way television-telephone' system (called an ikonophone —Greek: 'image-sound' ) was in regular experimental use, with Bell Labs facility in New York devoting years of research right up to the 1930s to its development, led by Ives along with his team of more than 200 scientists, engineers and technicians, intending to develop it for both telecommunications and broadcast entertainment purposes.

Ives is best known for conducting the Ives–Stilwell experiment, which provided direct confirmation of special relativity's time dilation. However, Ives himself regarded his experiment as a proof of the existence of the ether and hence, as he erroneously suggested, a disproof of the theory of relativity. He was discouraged by the reaction of the scientific community that had interpreted his experiment in the way opposite to his expectations.

He then turned to the theory and published a set of articles, where he demonstrated that not only Lorentz contraction but also time dilation can be explained based on classical physics, which he thought would “disprove” relativity.

This paradoxical aspect of Ives's work was described by his friend, the noted physicist H. P. Robertson, who contributed the following summary of Ives's attitude toward special relativity in a biography of Ives:

"Ives' work in the basic optical field presents a rather curious anomaly, for although he considered that it disproved the special theory of relativity, the fact is that his experimental work offers one of the most valuable supports for this theory, and his numerous theoretical investigations are quite consistent with it… his deductions were in fact valid, but his conclusions were only superficially in contradiction with the relativity theory—their intricacy and formidable appearance were due entirely to Ives' insistence on maintaining an aether framework and mode of expression. I... was never able to convince him that since what he had was in fact indistinguishable in its predictions from the relativity theory within the domain of physics, it was in fact the same theory... some who have not penetrated to the essence of Ives' theoretical work have seized upon it as overthrowing the special theory of relativity, and have used it as an argument for a return to outmoded and invalid ways of thought."

U. S. President Harry Truman awarded Ives a "Medal for Merit" in 1948 for his war-time work on blackout lighting and optical communication systems.