Marcel J. E. Golay collection

Marcel Jules Edouard Golay was born on May 3, 1902 in Neuchatel Switzerland. He received his degree as an electrical engineer from Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (E.T.H.) in Zurich. Upon graduation he was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories but after four years left to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago and in 1931 was awarded his Ph.D. Since his thesis dealt with atomic physics, he decided to accept an offer from the U.S. Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He remained there for the next twenty-five years and was involved in radar systems development. He also invented the Golay Detector which detected aircraft by their emitted infrared radiation. When Golay retired from the Signal Corps in 1955 he became a consultant to two different corporations the Philco Corporation of Philadelphia, PA, whom he advised on matters concerning information theory, and the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Norwalk Connecticut, whom he advised on matters concerning scientific instrumentation. Eventually he gravitated to full-time work with Perkin-Elmer where he became a senior research scientist with special interest in the emerging field of gas chromatography. At Perkin-Elmer he also worked on NMR coils, binary and ternary codes, data extraction, pattern recognition and created the Golay Logic Processor and the open-tubular column for use in gas chromatography. Still active, Golay died at his home in La Conversion, Switzerland on April 27, 1989.