Frank Beck (computer scientist)
Dr Frank Beck (born December 28, 1930) is a British computer scientist who pioneered user-interface hardware including the touchscreen and the video wall while working at CERN during the 1970s.
Early life
He was born as Franz Beck in Vienna, Austria to Friedrich and Edith Beck, a non-religious Jewish couple who worked in a family-owned business. At the age of 8, shortly before the outbreak of World War II he escaped to London, England with his mother. His father stayed behind, escaping to France, where he survived for three years before being sent to Auschwitz and killed. On arrival in England, Franz anglicized his name to Frank, and, like thousands of other children, was evacuated from London during hostilities.
After leaving school, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force where he worked as a radio engineer, and learned about electronics. When his National Service ended he worked in an electronics lab while studying mathematics at Chelsea Polytechnic (now King’s College) and Birkbeck College. At this time he became interested in the emerging science of computer programming, and became a programmer on his employer’s HEC computer, a commercially available machine. In 1958 he married Margaret Louise Hammel (1934–2003, known as Louise). Frank and Louise's sons Simon and Stephen were born in 1961 and 1962.
CERN, Argonne and the Fermilab
In 1962, he was invited to apply for a position as a mathematician at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and the family moved there. In 1967 Beck was invited to work at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in the United States, and the family moved to La Grange, Illinois . At Argonne Beck did some pioneering work on pattern recognition for bubble-chamber photographs. The machine for doing this involved an interactive human interface.
Activity at CERN in the meantime focussed on the construction of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), and in 1972 Beck was invited back to Europe to design and build the SPS control room and its hardware and software. In 1973 he published a CERN document, along with his colleague Bent Stumpe, outlining the concept for a prototype touchscreen as well as a multi-function computer-configurable knob, both of which found their way onto the consoles of the finished control room. The CERN touchscreen was arguably the first practical device of its kind and used a matrix of transparent capacitative pads above a cathode-ray tube.
Beck began post-graduate studies at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. His doctoral thesis, presented in 1976, was an expanded version of the 1973 CERN paper, this time also describing the control philosophy, which allowed skilled operators to design their own interface methods, and the various devices (including the knob and the touchscreen, the video wall, multi-coloured computer displays and video projectors), all of which were being applied at CERN. In 1983 he moved back to Illinois for two years, this time to work at the Fermilab in Batavia before returning once more to CERN.
Later life and retirement
He retired in the early 1990s and he and Louise returned to London. Frank has two sons and four grandchildren.
References
- F. Beck and M. Gormley “Computer control of large accelerators, design concepts and methods” AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 127, pp. 624–692 (1985)
External links
- Discovery Channel – "How We Invented the World": Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe describe the touch-screen as developed at CERN, and how their device has become part of everyday life.
- 1973 CERN paper: "Two devices for operator interaction in the central control of the new CERN accelerator"
- Frank Beck's PhD thesis in PDF format
- Dr Beck's autobiography, "Grandpa's Book"
- Jewish Chronicle, November 27, 2008
- CERN Courier, March 31, 2010