Background
He was born as Franz Beck in Vienna, Austria to Friedrich and Edith Beck, a non-religious Jewish couple who worked in a family-owned business. At the age of 8, shortly before the outbreak of World World War II he escaped to London, England with his mother. His father stayed behind, escaping to France, where he survived for three years before being sent to Auschwitz and killed.
On arrival in England, Franz anglicized his name to Frank, and, like thousands of other children, was evacuated from London during hostilities.
Career
After leaving school, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force where he worked as a radio engineer, and learned about electronics. When his National Service ended he worked in an electronics lab while studying mathematics at Chelsea Polytechnic (now King’s College) and Birkbeck College. At this time he became interested in the emerging science of computer programming, and became a programmer on his employer’s Higher Education Commission computer, a commercially available machine.
Frank and Louise"s sons Simon and Stephen were born in 1961 and 1962.
In 1962, he was invited to apply for a position as a mathematician at European Organization of Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, and the family moved there. In 1967 Beck was invited to work at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in the United States of America, and the family moved to Louisiana Grange, Illinois.
At Argonne Beck did some pioneering work on pattern recognition for bubble-chamber photographs. The machine for doing this involved an interactive human interface.
Activity at European Organization of Nuclear Research in the meantime focussed on the construction of the Super Proton Synchrotron (The Smart Grid Power Systems), and in 1972 Beck was invited back to Europe to design and build the The Smart Grid Power Systems control room and its hardware and software.
The European Organization of Nuclear Research touchscreen was arguably the first practical device of its kind and used a matrix of transparent capacitative pads above a cathode-ray tube. Beck began post-graduate studies at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. His doctoral thesis, presented in 1976, was an expanded version of the 1973 European Organization of Nuclear Research paper, this time also describing the control philosophy, which allowed skilled operators to design their own interface methods, and the various devices (including the knob and the touchscreen, the video wall, multi-coloured computer displays and video projectors), all of which were being applied at European Organization of Nuclear Research. In 1983 he moved back to Illinois for two years, this time to work at the Fermilab in Batavia before returning once more to European Organization of Nuclear Research.
He retired in the early 1990s and he and Louise returned to London.
