| Name |
Robert Noel "Bob" Hall |
| Prefix |
Dr. |
| Suffix |
Ph.D. |
| Nickname |
Bob |
| Born |
25 Dec 1919 |
New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut  |
| Gender |
Male |
| Group |
Descendant of Revolutionary War Veteran |
- DAR or SAR Eligible Descendant of a Revolutionary War Veteran
|
| Group |
Famous Historical Figure |
|
|
| Group |
Hall Direct Descendant |
- A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family
|
| Group |
Halls of Rehoboth - DNA Family 006 |
- Descendants of Edward Hall of Rehoboth, Massachusetts (Hall DNA Family 006), and extended and allied families and their ancestors.
|
| FindaGrave Memorial ID |
172472347 |
|
|
| 1930 Census |
2 Apr 1930 |
Garrochales, Arecibo County, Puerto Rico |
- ED 15, sheet 2B (entry is in Spanish)
Hall, H. V. M. Head M W 40 Md CT CT CT Administrator - Finca de toronjeo
---, Clara K. Wife F W 38 Md NJ Holland Lindin Germany
---, Sydney Mallan Son M W 13 S San Diego CA CT NJ
---, Robert Noel Son M W 10 S CT CT NJ
|
| Died |
7 Nov 2016 |
Schenectady, Schenectady County, New York |
| Buried |
Aft 7 Nov 2016 |
Park View Cemetery, Schenectady, Schenectady County, New York |
| Obituary |
9 Nov 2016 |
Albany, Albany County, New York |
| Albany Times Union |
- Robert Noel Hall
SCHENECTADY -- Robert Noel Hall, 96, passed away on Monday, November 7, 2016.
Bob was born in New Haven, Conn. on December 25, 1919, to the late Harry and Clara Hall.
He attended Alameda High School and graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a B.S. degree in physics in 1942 and subsequently obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech in 1948. In the midst of his studies, Bob worked for Lockheed Aircraft (1940-1941) and General Electric, Schenectady (1942-1946) as a test engineer. While there he worked on continuous wave magnetrons to jam enemy radar; his version of the magnetron was subsequently used to operate most microwave ovens.
Upon graduation, Dr. Hall accepted a position back at the General Electric Research and Development Lab in Schenectady, which he greatly enjoyed until his retirement in 1987. One of his earliest projects involved transistors and power rectifiers using germanium. This work led to developments in A.C.-to-D.C. power conversion. In 1962, Bob invented the semiconductor injection laser. His laser had many applications familiar to us all including compact disc players, laser printers, and optical fiber communications. Next, during the 1970s, Dr. Hall worked on photovoltaics and solar cells.
Over the course of his career he was awarded 43 U.S. patents. Bob was a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was a member of the National Academy of Science and of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1989 he received the Marconi International Fellowship, presented personally to him by Princess Anne in London. Dr. Hall was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994.
A man of varied interests and a ceaseless desire to learn, Bob enjoyed the outdoors, including at various times summer homes on Hunt Lake and Lake George. His interests included hiking, sailing, travel with his family, both square and folk dancing and the company of his dog, Katie.
Throughout his life he dedicated himself to taking great care of his family, most especially his wife as her health declined. Bob was a member of Faith United Methodist Church. Bob was predeceased by his beloved wife, Dora in 2013. He leaves behind a son, Richard Hallock Hall of Schenectady; and a daughter Elaine Louise (Daniel) Schulz of Rexford; as well as his brother, Syd of Nevada City, Calif. and several cousins, nieces, and nephews.
The family of Robert Hall would like to thank the Kingsway Community for their friendship and care over the past several years, most especially the staff of Parkland Gardens and Kingsway Arms Nursing Center.
Relatives and friends are invited to attend a funeral service on Friday at 1 p.m. at the Jones Funeral Home, 1503 Union St., (at McClellan St.), Schenectady, with Reverend, Steven Smith officiating. Calling hours will be held on Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the funeral home.
Burial will follow in Park View Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in Robert's memory to F.U.M.C., 811 Brandywine Ave., Schenectady, NY 12308 or to the Wildwood Foundation, 229 Curry Rd., Schenectady, NY 12303. To leave condolences for Robert's family please visit jonesfh.net
|
 |
Robert Noel Hall (1919-2016)
|
| Obituary |
10 May 2018 |
New York, New York County, New York |
| New York Times |
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/obituaries/robert-n-hall-96-whose-inventions-are-everywhere-is-dead.html
Robert N. Hall, 96, Whose Inventions Are Everywhere, Is Dead
By Don R. Hecker
Robert N. Hall's legacy can be found at almost every checkout counter — that little red blinking laser scanner that reads bar codes on milk cartons, boxes of light bulbs, price tags dangling from a new jacket and just about everything else that can be bought in a store.
A product of his inventive labor can also be found in most kitchens nowadays: the microwave oven.
Yet for all the widespread familiarity of what Dr. Hall wrought as a remarkably ingenious physicist, his death, at 96, on Nov. 7, 2016, gained little notice. An announcement paid for by his family appeared in two upstate New York newspapers — The Times Union of Albany and The Daily Gazette of Schenectady — and General Electric, in a company publication, published a remembrance a month later. But otherwise the news of Dr. Hall's death did not travel very far.
His daughter, Elaine Schulz, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that besides buying the newspaper notices, the family had alerted some organizations with which Dr. Hall had been connected. He died of complications of pneumonia in a hospital near his home in Schenectady, she said.
The New York Times learned of Dr. Hall's death while editing an obituary about him that had been prepared in advance in 2012.
Dr. Hall left his fingerprints far and wide. He built the first solid-state laser in 1962. Nearly 20 years earlier, during World War II, he designed a magnetron to jam enemy radar that, thanks to a melting candy bar, was adapted to create the microwave oven.
Another of his inventions makes it possible to control the high-voltage DC current that runs things like electric locomotives. His gamma ray detector is used in nuclear research. And his laser not only promotes faster checkouts, channel surfing and pointers; it also enables fiber optics to carry data.
It's probably fair to say, however, that when he invented his laser in the fall of 1962, Dr. Hall could never have imagined the uses to which it would one day be put, for he was not a consumer product developer. He was an experimenter who spent his entire career at what is now GE Global Research, a General Electric research laboratory, in Niskayuna, N.Y., outside Schenectady.
Lasers had been invented in 1960, but they were bulky, complex affairs built around simulated rubies or chambers full of a gas that could be "excited" into giving off light, the rays of which bounced between mirrors until they were concentrated into a single beam.
Dr. Hall's laser device, by contrast, was a single, small solid-state semiconductor piece that had to be cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen — more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero — making it an unlikely candidate for consumer uses. Once the principle of a tiny, solid laser was established, however, others refined it.
By Dr. Hall's account, in a videotaped 2010 interview, the laser had its origins in a fellow scientist's teasing. Since Dr. Hall had "invented all kinds of things," he recalled his colleague saying, "Why didn't I invent a semiconductor laser?" His earlier inventions, after all, had earned him the freedom to do what he wanted at the G.E. laboratory and a small team to help him do it.
Dr. Hall was skeptical at first that he could build a semiconductor laser, but after reading others' research, he concluded that it was possible. Based on published experiments, he settled on gallium arsenide as the most promising medium.
Using semiconductors the size of "a grain of salt," he said, he polished their parallel faces to mimic the mirrors used in existing lasers. Current was introduced at the ends of the semiconductors. In only a few months, he and his team had produced a working solid laser.
Dr. Hall was already well known among colleagues for purifying germanium, the primary material in the early diodes that were used in solid-state electronics. (A diode in its simplest form is a kind of one-way valve for electrical current.) He discovered that freezing a piece of germanium would leave impurities at one end, giving him the purest germanium yet produced.
Advancing that work, he began adding the element indium to the germanium, and discovered that the resulting semiconductor could control heavy loads of current.
But he also found that the existing explanation of how electrons moved through semiconductors was not matching his calculations. So he devised a new explanation for the process, which is now known as Hall-Shockley-Read recombination. (The other discoverers were William B. Shockley, who was a winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor, and W. T. Read Jr.)
Dr. Hall began working at the G.E. lab after graduating from the California Institute of Technology in 1942. With World War II in progress, he soon designed a type of magnetron that could jam enemy radar. Shortly afterward, an engineer at Raytheon standing near one of the devices noticed that it had melted a candy bar in his pocket. Raytheon engineers used the discovery to develop the microwave oven.
After the war, Dr. Hall returned to Caltech for a doctorate. With the encouragement of his advisers, who were excited by the atomic age, he began studying nuclear physics. He received his Ph.D. in 1948.
Dr. Hall would never enter the field professionally. But though he never did nuclear research, a classmate did, and it was through him that Dr. Hall learned that nuclear physicists were bedeviled by a problem with the germanium used in devices that detected the gamma rays given off by radioactive activity — rays that are deadly at high exposures.
Dr. Hall reasoned that he could solve the problem by purifying germanium to the point where no more than one-millionth of a millionth part would be impure — an unheard-of level. Few believed that that was possible, but Dr. Hall succeeded, creating the detector that is used worldwide today.
Dr. Hall held more than 40 patents in the United States. He was awarded the Marconi Prize in 1989 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994. He retired from the G.E. lab in 1987.
Robert Noel Hall was born on Dec. 25, 1919, in New Haven, the youngest of two sons of Harry and Clara (Kommers) Hall. (They gave him the middle name Noel because he was born on Christmas Day.) Harry Hall was a horticulturalist who took odd jobs to support his family during the Depression.
Besides his daughter, Dr. Hall is survived by a son, Richard. His wife of more than 70 years, Dora, died in 2013. His brother, Sydney, died last year.
Dr. Hall said he became interested in science as an 11-year-old when an uncle, Sydney Hall, an early aircraft-engine designer, took him to a science fair.
In a 2012 interview for this obituary, he talked about the pleasure he took in a life of science. "You see there is a problem to be solved," he said, "and you think about it, and you solve it, and it's a thrill."
|
| Person ID |
I20208 |
New England Hall Families Master Tree |
| Last Modified |
18 Mar 2021 |
1919 - 2016 (96 years)
