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xvi A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE INTO GROUNDING
After graduation in 1949, I started working as an electronics engi-
neer at a company called Applied Physics Corporation located in
Pasadena, CA. My rst boss was George W. Downs, a well-respected
entrepreneur. During the war, he had worked as a high-level consultant
and was associated with the Atomic Energy Commission. I had a lot
to learn. The company products included oscillographs, electrometers,
and spectrophotometers. I was impressed with the beautiful packaging
and the fact they were so well respected by their customers. All of their
products used vacuum tubes and I saw “grounding” for the rst time.
They explained to me how they used a grounding stud that collected all
the common leads used in the instrument. This included the metal case,
the equipment ground, the centertap on the secondary of the power
transformer, the transformer shield, and the various circuit commons.
There was no explanation given to me as to why this was the best
solution. I was told that the order used in placing these conductors on
the stud was important, and they had found a solution that made the
instrument free of noise. In later years, this star-grounding congura-
tion would appear in very unusual places. At the time, I had no basis
to be critical of star-grounding methods. The products worked well
and engineers with years of experience had spoken. Do not mistake
me. A grounding stud was a valid approach to building this product.
It is not however a solution to grounding in general. Asking questions
did not yield useful answers and I did what everyone else did – I used
common sense, I copied the procedures used in other products, and I
experimented when I could. I was a part of the work force.
My rst assignment as an engineer was to design a dc instrumentation
amplier. This type of instrument was needed in conditioning signals
from strain gages, position sensors, and thermocouples. I was shown a
circuit approach that had been developed by RCA that used a mechan-
ical chopper to correct for dc drift. I was soon immersed in regulated dc
power supplies, transformers, laments, tube type selections, and feed-
back. I managed a design one channel of dc amplier including a power
supply that weighed over 70 lb. Do not forget that vacuum tubes take
several hundred volts to operate and these voltages had to be very care-
fully regulated. When I look back at those early days, I can see how
far electronic instrumentation has come and in particular how much I
had to learn. At the beginning, there were no shielded transformers,
feedback techniques were primitive, noise and hum were problems, and
there was a limited understanding of signal isolation. There were sele-
nium rectiers that did not work very well. Dc ampliers and vacuum
tubes are a denite mismatch. In those days, that was all there was.