Captain Kirk And His Spatial Light Modulator

Ron Kirk came back to Findlay, Ohio, with a fireman's commission and a deep curiosity about holography. Today his small company, Holotronics, holds the brightest promise his townspeople have seen since the coming of Marathon Oil.

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When we last saw Tom Swift, teenage boy wonder and ace inventor, he was trying to sell the United States War Department on his latest brainstorm: the "magnetic silencer." The year was 1940, and world peace, like the series of original Swift novels that delighted and inspired generations of young Americans, was just about over. Facing yet another panel of skeptical experts, Swift showed how his invention could keep U.S. planes safe from enemy anti-aircraft. The military boys were beside themselves with glee. "You have made a very great contribution to your country's defense!" crowed Colonel Brooks, accepting Swift's invention on behalf of his government. End of story, end of series. No one ever told us if Tom grew up to parlay his patents into a billion-dollar manufacturing fortune, or whether Brooks counseled him on an immediate public offering.

If all this seems like the province of faded adolescent fantasy, consider the very real-life saga of Ronald Kirk, a saga that even Tom Swift aficionados might find hard to believe. Kirk, 31, is the founder and chief executive officer of The Holotronics Corp., a tiny technology company with a promise so big that grown men have been known to drop the name "Xerox" beside it when groping for historical analogies.

Holotronics, which started in Kirk's basement, currently has seven employees (the officers include a fire captain and a plainclothes sheriff's deputy) and operates out of low-rent quarters in the back of Errett's Car Waxing shop, in Findlay, Ohio, the founder's hometown. Kirk moved his company into the rear of Mr. Errett's garage when he heard he could lease the space for $245 a month, heat included. On the day last September when Holotronics was notified of its award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop Kirk's main invention, an Optical Tunnel Array -- a kind of spatial light modulator, or SLM (see "So What is a Spatial Light Modulator, Anyway?" page 104) -- one of Holotronics's directors was heard to remark, "If anyone from Washington came out here and saw this mess, they wouldn't believe we were for real."

Then again, they might not believe the CEO's career path, either. Kirk graduated from Findlay High School in 1970; his adoptive father worked for the Findlay Streets Department. In high school, Kirk, who was an "indifferent" student, spent most of his time reading Popular Science and Scientific American and doing weird, late-night signal-bouncing off various parts of the solar system with a homemade ham radio set.

After a stint in the Air Force (crash rescue, not electronics), Kirk moved to Bowling Green, Ohio, and in due course he wound up designing customized systems for an interconnect company in nearby Toledo -- and loathing the bureaucratic restraints imposed on his own lab experiments. So he packed up and went home, to a job with the Findlay Fire Department. The job required throwing his young body into burning buildings on a one-day-in-three basis. On his days off, he began dabbling in optics, electronics, and holography. And here, Tom Swift fans, is where the line between science fiction and established physics really begins to blur.

At the time Kirk got seriously into it, holography was, for all practical purposes, a stalled science. Although the basic principles were well known, holograms (three-dimensional images produced by a split-laser-beam-on-photographic-plate technique) represented one of those brave new technological frontiers of the 1960s that had somehow failed to deliver on its early promise. Part of the problem was patent squabbles and proprietary rights; the larger issue, however, was one of commercial application and marketability. Simply put, nobody was making much money making holograms, and several companies that had hoped to had gone under. While industry drooled over potential quality-control applications (particularly in conjunction with robotics), the tedium and expense of producing higher resolution holograms became enormous. Because of their physical fragility, these pictures were risky business. Even more disappointing, researchers had yet to come up with the one big breakthrough ("the Holy Grail," one observer called it) everyone anticipated: a way to achieve "real-time" holography, or 3-D pictures, at least 30 frames per second, that could be reprojected without going through an interim developing step In this instance, the stumbling block was processing enormous amounts of information about a single visual image in what amounts to no time at all.

"I'd been drawn to holography since reading about it in the late '60s," explains Kirk, a mercurial talker who likes to punctuate his data-laden monologues with mad bouts at the blackboard. "As I understood it, most of the work being carried out 15, 20 years ago was centered on the film part. Using bigger pieces of film to achieve life-size holograms, for instance. When I checked around with other researchers, all of them felt stymied. None of them saw film itself as the ultimate obstacle that had to be overcome."

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