| (Dr. Kurt Lehovec at my house.) |
|
| (his book) |
Dr. Kurt Lehovec is a poet living in Los Angeles. I met him at an open-mike poetery reading at a nearby coffee shop called "The Tsunami." His poems are cool Click here to read them.
We got to talking. He's lead an amazing life. He is this sweet old gray-haired man, from the Czech Republic, and he read wonderful love poems in a heavy accent from his self-published book (above)
He told me that in 1959 he co-invented the P-N insulation layer which enables microchips to work. He said he was on salary at the Sprague Electric Company. They owned all his intellectual property because of his contract, and he was paid only one dollar for the patent.
I looked him up on the Web and it's all true.
One dollar! It made me feel like life is unfair. But he told me he didn't mind, and didn't want fame. Said that if a lot of people knew, he'd have to go on television and would "No longer be a free man".
He said "I don't wear a watch and don't want one".
He cares a lot more about beauty and poetry than about money. I told him I'd do a web page for him for free to help promote his poetry. Here it is.
I've been to his house ironically, he has a very old computer that barely goes online.
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The book is called Facets of Love: 100 Poems (amazon link here.) (also available on Barns and Nobel).
Another book of poems by Kurt: A Modern Genesis
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Kurt published the first paper on how solar energy conversion works in 1947 in The Physical Review. Kurt and his co-workers Accardo and Jamgochian discovered the mechanism for light emission from solids when an electric current is passed over the P-N junction (light emitting diode).
Las year, Kromer, not Kurt Lehovec, obtained the Nobel Prize for using the Light Emitting Diode as a Laser.
Kurt Lehovec has done a lot more, but here are a few articles about Kurt's co-invention of the microchip process:
in English:
DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
in other languages:
Historia komputera - Chronologia
História do Computador
- Parte 2
astro4.ast.vill.edu/mlcug/Newsletters/nl189.txt
Informationstechnik IT * Gegenstand der Informationstechnik ist ... (PDF)
Noyce.sci.american (RTF)
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Dr. Kurt started writing poetry at 71.
Kurt has never been interested in poetry, having concentrated his whole life on science. Then, after the tragic unexpected death of his friend Leticia, he borded a bus for the East Coast to get away. He read on the bus the Los Angeles Times and stumbled on the literary section which reprinted a poem that they considered to be marvelous. He did not think so. He had to go back to his high school days in Czechoslavakia, when a poem was not a poem without rhyme, rhythm and stances.
He started writing poems right then on the bus, "To show them".
He has not stopped and has written three thousand poems.
He is working on a second book of poems and an autobiography.
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