Understandings Alexander Matveevich

Biography

Alexander Matveyevich Ponyatov was born in the Kazan province, studied mathematics and physics, was a military pilot and officer in the army of Kolchak.

Emigration to Shanghai, France, USA

Ponyatov was in demand everywhere as an engineer - in Shanghai, in France, in the USA, where he fell at the height of the Great Depression, he found work. In America, he receives citizenship, works for Westinghouse.

1944: Ampex Company Opens and Production of Tape Recorders and Magnetic Film Launches

In 1944, in the area that will later be called Silicon Valley, he opened his own company Ampex (this is an acronym - Alexander Matveyevich Ponyatov Experiment) - he becomes a contractor for Westinghouse, supplies electric motors for locators produced by his former company. But the war is ending, the demand for locators is falling, you need to load development and production with something.

The level of development of technology in Germany at that time did not cease to surprise the Americans, who until 1949 occupied a third of the former Reich. So a certain major Malin was impressed by a sound recording and playback device called Magnitophon. He dismantled it, arranged it in 18 parcels (the requirements for sending souvenirs in the army were strict) and took it to the United States. Rumors about this amazing device reached Alexander Ponyatov and he decided to start producing new items.

Ponyatov even found an investor: the popular singer Bing Crosby, who invested 50 thousand in the case. Launching production is always difficult, and launching a novelty, even having a prototype in hand, is an extremely difficult thing. Nevertheless, everything turns out, its tape recorders are significantly superior to their counterparts and they are purchased first by recording studios, and then by ordinary people, for whom special models are being developed. In addition, Ponyatov launched the production of magnetic film (Ampex coils and cassettes).

Improving the VCR

In the early 1950s, Ponyatov "became infected" with the idea of ​ ​ creating a video recorder. The first appeared back in 1952 at the BBC studio, but its quality is low, and Ponyatov feels that it is possible to make a device of a fundamentally different level.

He assembles a dream team led by his chief engineer Lindsay and Matvei Stolyarov. By the way, this brilliant engineer will then go into a completely different "science" - he will study the influence of drugs on creativity. He will even call for LSD to be handed out at Ampex right at workplaces. It will not come to this, but Stolyarov himself until the end of his days, up to 93 years old, will be busy looking for a positive effect of drugs. The team of engineers includes the already mentioned Malin, as well as Charles Ginsburg, who will later be talked about as a genius, and even the young Ray Dolby (the same, the inventor of the noise cancellation system), whom Ponyatov hired as an engineer at the age of 16.

The idea was a success - the best video recorder on the planet was created, even competitors in the person of RCA with other brilliant immigrants from Russia, Sarnov and Zvorykin, who had previously tried to create their own device, buy it. Understandings are thought out instead of horizontal placement of information on the track to do vertical, from now on, not short clips can be recorded on film, but any volumes of video.

Unlike Zvorykin or Sikorsky, Ponyatov was not a public figure, he almost did not communicate with the press. The Russian inventor died in 1980, in Palo Alto.