T. Peter Brody

For: Flat-panel displays

The Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean manufacturers that produce the active-matrix LCDs found in nearly every flat-panel display today owe their success to T. Peter Brody, who in the early 1970s first used thin-film transistors to control pixels in liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) to create crisp, bright images on a flat panel.

Both technologies had been around for some time when the Hungarian-born Brody, then a researcher at Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburg, decided to marry TFTs to an LCD panel to eliminate the key shortcoming of passive LCDs.

Unfortunately for him and for the U.S. display industry, Westinghouse ignored Brody’s innovations. “Westinghouse was very short-sighted,” Brody said. “We were too far ahead.”

But Japanese manufacturers took note of Brody’s papers and presentations, and in the early 1980s began pouring millions into development.

When Westinghouse terminated his project in 1979, Brody formed a company called Panelvision and by 1983 was producing TFT LCD panels, but the company couldn’t compete with the Japanese.

Thirty-plus years later, Brody is still at it. He is president and CEO of Amedeo, a stealth-mode startup developing organic LEDs, which one day could replace TFT LCDs. Ironically, he is renting space in the same lab where he first developed the innovation that revolutionized display technology and paved the way for ubiquitous computing.

Education: B.S. Honors, Ph.D. in mathematical physics, University of London
Yahoo or Google: Google
Favorite Blog: “Don’t read ’em.”
Favorite handheld: Treo
Most-used app: Excel, unfortunately; otherwise, TurboCad
First paying job: Lecturer in physics at the University of London
Bush or Kerry: “Kerry, by an infinite margin.”
Carb or no carbs: “Everything, in moderation.”

 Published for the Week Of October 18, 2004