Career
Brown received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1937, and his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1941. He joined Raytheon in 1940 and began work on their magnetron microwave amplifier products. By 1952 his work on adapting magnetron principles to create a new broadband amplifier resulted in the "Amplitron", today known more commonly as a crossed-field amplifier (CFA).
In 1961 Brown published the first paper proposing microwave energy for power transmission, and in 1964 he demonstrated on Walter Cronkite"s Columbia Broadcasting System Evening News a microwave-powered model helicopter that received all the power needed for flight from a microwave beam.
Between 1969 and 1975 Brown was technical director of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Raytheon program that beamed 30 kilowatts over a distance of 1-mile (16 km) at 84% efficiency. He continued to make important contributions to this emerging technology until his retirement from Raytheon in 1984.
