Sunday’s Star-Ledger has a terrific profile of Fair Haven’s Bob Lucky, head of the Fort Monmouth re-use panel and an engineer whose seminal work led to the creation of the Internet.

The article, by Wayne Wolley, begins:

Bob Lucky earned his status as an information-age pioneer while idling at a stop light in Red Bank.

The year was 1964, and Lucky was a 28-year-old Bell Labs electrical engineer who had been wrestling for months to create a way to transmit electronic data over telephone lines. The final piece eluding him was finding a way to eliminate distortions in the signal. The eureka moment came as Lucky mentally rewrote a portion of a mathematical equation that ran for several pages.

“I waited up all night to get back to the office to see if it would work,” Lucky says.

The invention, the adaptive equalizer, ended up becoming more than U.S. Patent No. 3,414,819. It became the starting point for every high-speed modem in use today.

In addition to being the husband of Two River Times photographer Joan Lucky, Lucky is also the 1987 winner of the Marconi Prize and a member of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.

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