They Took What Was Possible -- and Pushed It

Furman Magazine Volume 63 Issue 1 Spring 2020 Article 19 4-1-2020 They Took What Was Possible -- And Pushed It Kelley Bruss Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/furman-magazine Recommended Citation Bruss, Kelley (2020) "They Took What Was Possible -- And Pushed It," Furman Magazine: Vol. 63 : Iss. 1 , Article 19. Available at: https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/furman-magazine/vol63/iss1/19 This Article is made available online by Journals, part of the Furman University Scholar Exchange (FUSE). It has been accepted for inclusion in Furman Magazine by an authorized FUSE administrator. For terms of use, please refer to the FUSE Institutional Repository Guidelines. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THEY rnnKii^ WHAT WAS M R POSSIBLE-AND PUSHED IT ^ A vision, a “what if,” a breakthrough - sometimes life depends on it. Other times, it’s life as we know it but with culture-defining flavor. Meet four of Furman’s greatest - Herman Lay ’30, H ’67, Fran Smith Ligler ’72, H ’18, Thomas Goldsmith Jr. ’31, H ’59 and Charles Townes ’35, H ’60. BY KELLEY BRUSS URMAN STUDENTS leave campus every year ready to make a mark in their careers and cities. And over the years, a handful 0 have left to achieve things so significant the effects have been felt around the world. Some of their names you may know. Some of their work you may use every day, w ithout even knowing it. Their paths are unique. But they have shared a remarkable commitment to those paths, a confidence that more was possible and that they were the ones to reach for it. FURMA-N'I SPRING 2020 25 HE SEIZED AN OPPORTUNITY - His story has a suggestion AT AGE 10 of destiny: As a 10-year-old, Lay reportedly sold peanuts His last name is a potato chip and soft drinks at Greenville icon - thick, white letters on a Spinners baseball games. In 1926, waving red banner. But the legacy he started at Furman but left in of Herman Lay ’30 extends far 1928 to earn money to continue beyond the snack aisle, and into his education. After a series of philanthropy and cultural ubiquity. short-term positions, he took a Lay, who attended Furman job as a distributor for a potato in the 1920s, was the first CEO chip company. of PepsiCo, the company formed But instead of returning to in 1965 through a merger of his college, he bought out his employer Frito-Lay with Pepsi-Cola. Today, in 1939 and reorganized as H.W. PepsiCo is a multibillion-dollar Lay and Company, selling Lay’s blue chip company, selling food Potato Chips for the first time. and beverages around the world. Anthony Herrera, executive And it’s not just Pepsi, Fritos director of Furman’s Office for and Lays. If your pantry holds Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Quaker, Gatorade, Tropicana, says people who operate like Lay Ruffles, Cheetos or Aquafina are game changers. products, to name a few, Lay’s “He seized an opportunity by company is in your life. developing a product customers want,” Herrera says. After becoming one of the largest snack food companies in the Southeast, Lay merged with a Texas businessman selling Fritos corn chips. Just four years later, Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola formed PepsiCo. In its online overview, the company reports operating today in more than 200 countries and territories. Its brands include 22 that each generate more than $1 billion in annual retail sales. Furman awarded Lay an honorary doctoral degree in 1967. He retired as chairman of PepsiCo in 1971 but maintained an active role in the company until his death in 1982. “It’s not every day that a university can claim that they have an entrepreneur at that scale,” Herrera says. Top: Portrait of Herman Lay. Bottom: A Pepsi-Cola advertisement from an old bottling factory on Long Island, N.Y. 26 FURMAN | SPRING 2020 LIVES DEPEND ON IT Fran Smith Ligler ’72 was working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the 1980s when she started having trouble sleeping at night. Homeland security was a hot topic and she intimately understood the destructive power of biochemistry. “I realized that I had the expertise to wipe out the city of Washington; that scared me,” Ligler says. But fear didn’t paralyze her. It sent her to the lab, where her team designed portable sensors to detect agents used in biological warfare. Ligler developed the biochemistry for the sensors: “How do you put ultrasensitive recognition molecules in a piece of hardware and keep them alive and functioning?” Some of her early sensors, constructed for Operation Desert Storm, weighed 150 pounds. Within a few years, they were less than 10 pounds and fully automated, small enough to be carried by a small drone. Today, one version can be stowed in a soldier’s backpack. In 2017, portable optical biosen sors for a wide variety of applica tions earned Ligler a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, alongside the likes of Thomas Fran Smith Ligler ’72 speaks during her induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2017. Edison and his electric lamp and (Bottom left) A copy of of Ligler’s publication “Optical Biosensors.” Orville and Wilbur Wright and their airplane. As of 2019, Ligler was one of 39 Ligler came from Louisville, women and 581 total inventors in the Kentucky, to study biology and Hall of Fame, which honors American chemistry at Furman. She finished patent holders who have demonstrated degrees in both sciences in three outstanding ingenuity and persistence. years and went on to earn a doctoral (Charles Townes ’35 was inducted degree in biochemistry from Oxford in 1976.) University. She is now a professor in Over her career, Ligler has patent the Joint Department of Biomedical ed and commercialized 11 biosensor Engineering at both the University of systems. Six remain on the market and North Carolina-Chapel Hill and are used in tasks as varied as detect North Carolina State University. ing and identifying biological warfare “I feel very fortunate that I have agents, sampling for contaminants in had a chance to work on very hard groundwater, scanning for explosives problems,” she says. in harbors, and testing new mothers in developing countries for diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis. FURMAN | SPRING 2020 27 electron beam landed,” At 10, Goldsmith built AN ‘AMUSEMENTDEVICE’ Goldsmith was remem THAT DID SO MUCH MORE Brantley says. “My grandchil an amplifier for his grand bered in his New York Times dren could have mastered it. mother, who was hard obituary primarily for his In 1966, Thomas Not me.” of hearing. role in the development of Goldsmith Jr. ’31 left the While the scientific world Decades later, he was part television, particularly color television industry and largely remembers Goldsmith of a DuMont Television team TV. But the Times also nodded returned to Furman as a for his contributions to televi working in a Washington, to patent No. 2,455,992, his physics professor. He moved sion and broadcasting, some D.C., hotel. That experiment “amusement device.” a truckload of equipment say he also deserves credit as resulted in WTTG DuMont labs struggled into the science building father of the video game. (for Thomas Toliver Gold financially, and Goldsmith’s and later invited his new Goldsmith and a partner smith), the nation’s second prototype was never devel colleague Bill Brantley to filed a patent in 1947 for a television station, which still oped commercially. come see the collection. “cathode-ray tube amusement broadcasts today as part of That didn’t stop Popular One of the devices echoed device.” In 1948, it became the Fox network. Mechanics from writing in Goldsmith’s radar work the first patent granted for an Goldsmith, a Greenville 2016 that “few recognize during World War II. Brant electronic game. native, earned a bachelor’s Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. ley, a physics professor at “He liked experimental degree in physics from Furman as inventor of the first Furman, describes it as a work,” Brantley says. “He and a Ph.D. from Cornell video game system. But mounted cathode ray tube was always making things. University. He was research they should.” that allowed a user to aim an He could take the proverbial director for Alan B. DuMont electron beam at targets chewing gum and string Laboratories before returning pasted outside of a screen. and make something or to Furman as a professor. With simple dials “you fix something.” He died in 2009 at 99. could control where the 28 FURMAN | SPRING 2020 THE TECHNOLOGY UPHOLDS OUR WHOLE ECONOMY’ Charles Townes ’35 set out to verify one of Einstein’s theories and give laboratory scientists a better way to probe matter, a heady project with a highly special ized application. But the device he built to create an intense beam of microwaves - the first of what we now call lasers - has had implications far beyond the laboratory. In fact, most people would find it difficult to go through even a single day without using one. “They’re ubiquitous,” says George Shields, a chemistry professor and former provost Townes and two Russian at Furman. scientists shared the 1964 Nobel Cash registers, CDs/DVDs, Prize in physics for the maser- eye surgery, tattoo removal, laser principle. MRIs, satellites, phones— Townes, who died in 2015 at in fact, the entire field 99, stayed connected to Furman of communications. throughout his life, including “It had a niche use when as a trustee and donor. Students it was invented, and now the today walk through the halls of the technology upholds our Charles H.

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