William M. Webster
- Birthdate
- 1925
- Birthplace
- Warsaw, NY, USA
- Associated organizations
- RCA (Radio Corporation of America)
- Fields of study
- Electronics
- Awards
- IEEE Frederik Philips Award
Biography
Born in Warsaw, New York, in 1925, William M. Webster received the B.S. degree in physics from Union College in 1945. He served briefly in the US Navy as a Lieutenant (jg) during World War II and joined RCA Laboratories in 1946 as a member of the technical staff.
Dr. Webster made numerous contributions to tube and transistor developments and became well known in the field of solid-state device physics. He studied part time at Princeton University for the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, which he received in 1954.
From 1954 to 1959, he was manager of advanced development for the RCA Semiconductor and Materials Division. He returned to RCA Laboratories as director of the Electronic Research Laboratory in 1959. He was appointed staff vice president, materials and device research in 1966 and has been in charge of RCA Laboratories since 1968. He was elected to his present position of corporate vice president in 1969.
Dr. Webster has been issued more than twenty-five patents in such diverse fields as television, vacuum tubes, gas tubes, circuitry, and semiconductor devices. He has written many papers and presented numerous talks in these areas of technology as well as on research management.
Many of RCA's advancements in television, integrated circuits, satellite communications, and liquid crystal displays were made under his leadership. He has played a major role in RCA's development of a Video Disc system for the playback of prerecorded television that RCA marketed first quarter of 1981.
Dr. Webster was a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of Sigma Xi and the National Academy of Engineering. He was also a director of Horizon Bancorp and the Princeton Bank and Trust Company as well as a trustee of both the Medical Center at Princeton and the Carrier Clinic Foundation.
