Early Life and Education
George Mueller was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 16, 1918. His mother came from Belleville, Illinois and had been a secretary, but she never worked after marriage. His father was an electrician who was superintendent of an electrical motor repair shop in St. Louis. Both parents spoke German, although Mueller never learned it.
He went to Benton School in St. Louis - until the 8th grade - then he and his parents moved to a larger house in the country called Bel Nor outside the city.
The young Mueller enjoyed reading science fiction and, helped by his grandfather, woodworking - although his first model ship capsized. When he was aged 11 or 12 Mueller also built and raced model aircraft - such as gliders and rubber band model airplanes. Always curious about how things worked, he also built radios. Interested in these activities the teenage Mueller wanted to be an aeronautical engineer but discovered that where he could go to school, the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) in Rolla, Missouri, there was no aeronautical engineering. They did have mechanical engineering so he plumped for this although finally found it discouraging, and switched over to electrical engineering.
Mueller assumed he would end up working in industry and so, in his senior year, went on a tour of various suitable companies. He applied to General Electric and Emerson but when he graduated in 1939 the economy took a downturn and he, like most of the class, had no job.
Luckily, after applying to several graduate schools he got an offer of a fellowship (funded by RCA) at Purdue. The fellowship was in a television project, Purdue was building a television transmitter for the campus, and it was the first of the kind that was using all vacuum tubes to produce the pictures. It was also the first using a CRT for display purposes. They still had mechanical disks for scanning but they were trying to develop an all-electronic approach.
Read more about this topic: George Mueller (NASA)
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