George Clifford Sziklai (July 9, 1909 – September 9, 1998) was a Hungarian-American renowned electronics engineer, who among many other contributions to radio and TV electronics invented the

transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...

configuration named after him, the

Sziklai pair In electronics, the Sziklai pair, also known as a complementary feedback pair, is a configuration of two bipolar transistors, similar to a Darlington pair. In contrast to the Darlington arrangement, the Sziklai pair has one NPN and one PNP transi ...

. Educated at the

University of Budapest A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...

and the

Technical University Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Establis ...

, Sziklai emigrated to New York in 1930. His long career included stations at

Radio Corporation of America The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was initially a patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, AT&T Corporation and United Fruit Comp ...

and

Westinghouse Electric Corporation The Westinghouse Electric Corporation was an American manufacturing company founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse. It was originally named "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" and was renamed "Westinghouse Electric Corporation" in ...

before he joined Lockheed's Palo Alto Research Laboratory in 1967. Sziklai, who held some 160 patents including

color television Color television or Colour television is a television transmission technology that includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white t ...

transmission, is also credited with constructing the first Image

Orthicon Video camera tubes were devices based on the cathode ray tube that were used in television cameras to capture television images, prior to the introduction of charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in the 1980s. Several different types of tubes ...

television camera and inventing a high-speed

elevator An elevator or lift is a wire rope, cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or deck (building), decks of a building, watercraft, ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sziklai, George C. Hungarian electrical engineers 20th-century Hungarian inventors 1909 births 1998 deaths Engineers from California People from Los Altos, California Technical University of Munich alumni 20th-century American engineers Hungarian emigrants to the United States