History and Practical Application
Reflected binary codes were applied to mathematical puzzles before they became known to engineers. The French engineer Émile Baudot used Gray codes in telegraphy in 1878. He received the French Legion of Honor medal for his work. The Gray code is sometimes attributed, incorrectly, to Elisha Gray (in Principles of Pulse Code Modulation, K. W. Cattermole, for example).
Frank Gray, who became famous for inventing the signaling method that came to be used for compatible color television, invented a method to convert analog signals to reflected binary code groups using vacuum tube-based apparatus. The method and apparatus were patented in 1953 and the name of Gray stuck to the codes. The "PCM tube" apparatus that Gray patented was made by Raymond W. Sears of Bell Labs, working with Gray and William M. Goodall, who credited Gray for the idea of the reflected binary code.
The use of his eponymous codes that Gray was most interested in was to minimize the effect of error in the conversion of analog signals to digital; his codes are still used today for this purpose, and others.
Read more about this topic: Gray Series
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history, practical and/or application:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Whether there be any such moral principles, wherein all men do agree, I appeal to any, who have been but moderately conversant in the history of mankind, and looked abroad beyond the smoke of their own chimneys. Where is that practical truth, that is universally received without doubt or question, as it must be, if innate?”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)