[QuadList] Ray Dolby passed today--Youngest of the six Quad pioneers at Ampex

[Ted Langdell]

Ray Dolby, the youngest of the six pioneering VTR engineers who developed the Quadruplex video recording format at Ampex passed away today at his San Francisco home.

Dolby was 80, and had been diagnosed in July with acute leukemia, according to a Dolby Labs press release. In recent years, Dolby had been living with Alzheimer's Disease.

http://investor.dolby.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=790493

Dr. Dolby is survived by his wife, Dagmar, his sons, Tom and David, their spouses, Andrew and Natasha, and four grandchildren.

A celebration of his life will be held at a later date.

The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations are made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 1060 La Avenida Street, Mountain View, CA 94043, or the Brain Health Center, c/o CPMC Foundation, 45 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94117.

Dolby founded Dolby Labs in 1965 and holds more than 50 patents.  He sponsored the acquisition of the Ampex Museum by Stanford University. 

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in January 1933 and his family eventually moved to the San Francisco Peninsula. 

While a student he was hired part-time by Ampex in 1949, and worked on various audio and instrumentation projects.

In 1952, Dolby was the second engineer assigned to the exploration of video recording at the pioneer audio recorder manufacturer, and joined Charles Ginsburg who had been hired in 1951 to work on the project.  

After a stint in the Army, Dolby re-joined Ampex and provided further contributions to the first practical video recorder, while attending Stanford University. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, left Ampex to study in England at Cambridge University from which he received a PhD in Physics in 1961.

His connection with sound was cemented through Dolby Labs.

In his passing, Dolby joins four Videotape® colleagues whose efforts made electronic picture recording practical and created jobs for thousands of engineers, camera operators, editors and technicians around the world.

Charles Anderson—who pressed for and developed the use of FM recording for the video signal—passed away in Sparks, Nevada on July 12 of last year (2012).  Anderson was the first full-time engineer hired for the project and remained with Ampex through retirement as an executive in 1984.

Alex Maxey joined the development team in 1954 and developed the curved vacuum guide that gently curved the 2" videotape into contact with the head drum, enabling the four heads to write tracks from the top to the bottom of the tape as it moved from left to right.  His experiments led to ways to control tape tension, which proved critical.  Maxey later proposed a helical scan VTR at Ampex, and worked on its creation using systems borrowed from the successful Ampex Quadruplex units.  Alex Maxey left Ampex to pursue development of Helical Scan recorders, and passed away in 2004 at age 82.

Charles Ginsburg died in Eugene, Oregon on April, 9, 1992, a few months shy of his 72nd birthday. He was an Ampex employee until he retired in 1986 as Vice President for Advanced Development.

Dolby's passing today leaves just two of the six pioneers living.

Fred Pfost—whose work on the video heads and assemblies was essential to the success of the project—and Shelby Henderson, the machinist and model-maker who brought plans and ideas to life in metal.

Henderson was reported wheelchair bound living in Oregon several years ago.

Pfost had a successful career outside of Ampex, working for 25 different companies on a wide range of projects. He is the VP of Engineering at ABD, Inc., on Los Altos, a position he's held since January of 1991.

Fred Pfost and his wife have organized an annual September gathering of "Ampex Old Timers."  This year's picnic will be in two days, at a park in Mountain View, not so many miles from where the the Quadruplex Videotape® recorder was born.

Ted

Ted Langdell
(530) 301-2931
ted at quadvideotapegroup.com
Secretary for the  QuadVideotapeGroup.com: 
Preserving Tape, Equipment and the Knowledge to use them, in conjunction with the Library of Congress



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