John Dove, 20th Century Inventor

On the day after the United States marked Martin Luther King's birthday in 2004, another remarkable black man died, in Rome, New York. His name was John Dove, 79, and he was the inventor of the technology which created the CD (compact disk) for storing information.

A graduate of Columbia University with degrees in math and science, John Dove was hired at the age of 20 by the US government to do research at the Rome Air Development Center, which is now the Air Force's Rome Laboratory. His employers were astonished to see a young black man arrive at their doorstep! Although initially they stuck him by himself in a back room, they soon realized that John could solve the most difficult technical problems, the ones no one else could figure out.

Born on a farm in North Carolina, John had served in the Army as an X-ray technician, and had developed a device that used electronic beams to record and store information. It was this technology that led to the invention of CDs for information storage. In the beginning, however, his superiors refused to believe that John, "handicapped" by his skin color and youth, could possibly be the inventor of this technology. "I was told it would not work, and that anybody who reveals this idea reveals their lack of scientific knowledge," Dove said. "The (Army) division chief came to me and said, 'I've heard your idea and you know better. You've shown your ignorance of science.' "

Nonetheless, John persisted with his idea, and earned a patent for it in 1965, disproving that he was "ignorant of science"!

John Dove went on to establish his own businesses, as Rome's first black real estate agent, and forming Dove Electronics Inc. in Rome in 1983. One of that company's most important products was a wind shear detector created for the Federal Aviation Administration. Dove's latest research was with Syracuse University on a fiber-optic amplifier that will amplify and transmit video and computer data through fiber optic lines. The use will be no different from regular telephone messages or Internet, Dove said shortly before his death, the only difference being that it uses light, which creates a faster speed.