Teacher's Tube

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Assistant Physics Professor Willard Geer of the University of Southern California liked to tell his class to go out and invent something. Once, while lecturing them on the "scanning disk" method of color television (TIME, Nov. 28), he suggested that better reception could be had with an electronic tube— if someone would invent one. When he mentioned it to his wife that night, she said: "You'd better get busy and invent it yourself."

Geer and his wife set to work in their home laboratory. They converted a sewing machine into a diesinking machine, used old auto batteries for electroplating, rigged up other makeshifts. In six months, Geer had run through his savings, but he had also developed a new electronic tube. For the next four years he fought over patents with Radio Corp. of America, in 1948 finally won all 40 claims in his patent application. Last week Willard Geer, now 47 and still a $4,500-a-year assistant professor at U.S.C., sold his tube* for a "substantial" sum to Hollywood's Technicolor, Inc.

Nobody claimed that the Geer tube was anywhere near perfect. But when & if perfected, the tube, Geer said, would make it easy to 1) convert existing TV sets to color, and 2) manufacture color television sets for less than the current prices of black & white receivers. The day after all this optimistic talk, Technicolor stock jumped 3¼ points to 20¼.