Remembering Ray Dolby

Ray Milton Dolby,(January 18, 1933 – September 12, 2013) 

was an American engineer and inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He was also a co-inventor of video tape recording while at Ampex. 

He was the founder of Dolby Laboratories. Dolby died of leukemia on September 12, 2013, at his home in San Francisco at the age of 80.

Dr. Ray Dolby founded Dolby Laboratories, Inc. in 1965 and built an environment where scientists and engineers push the limits of sight and sound. Dr. Dolby's pioneering work continues to inspire technologies that fuel the imagination of the entertainment and communications industries and his legacy of innovation will be felt for decades to come.

"Everybody laughed off what we were trying to do in creating a video recorder. You can't imagine the amount of snickering that went on in that late 1952 period when we were trying to build our first video tape recorder. Let's say we'd go into the lunch room or the coffee room to get a cup of coffee, and the other engineers would say, 'he's still working on that stuff? It's never gonna work."...........In his three-and-a-half hour Archive Interview, Ray Dolby (1933-2013) discusses his early interests in technology and music. He describes tinkering with tape recorders and starting to work at Ampex while still in high school (even getting national security clearance at age eighteen to work on classified projects).

Ray Dolby Quotes

On Success: —"I was never a gold-digger, or an Oscar-digger, or anything like that. I just had an instinct about the right sort of things that should be done in my business. So all these things just fell into place." —"I think I was both lucky and I was also straightforward with people, and I think they liked that attitude." —"There is no major next step. It's a matter of constantly being aware of one's environment, of keeping track of what's happening in the various industries that we're operating in and just sort of sensing what's possible and what's not possible, what's needed, what's not needed—just having all your antennae going, sensitized to all the signals that are out there."

On Inventing: —"I've often thought that I would have made a great 19th century engineer, because I love machinery. I would have liked to have been in a position to make a better steam engine, or to invent the first internal combustion engine; to work on the first car. All my life, I've loved everything that goes; I mean bicycles, motorcycles, cars, jeeps, boats, sail or power, airplanes, helicopters. I love all of these things, and I just regret that I was born in a time when most of those mechanical problems had already been solved and what remained were electronic problems." —"Remember that most of my life was that of an adventurer, not of somebody who is trying to invent something all the time. I wanted the experience of traveling to many parts of the world. Inventions were part of my life, but they didn't overtake everything that I was doing." —"To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer."

some sound related blog post:

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#picture and text thankfully shared from:
http://www.dolby.com/gb/en/about-us/who-we-are/remembering-ray-dolby.html#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dolby

http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/ray-dolby