The aspiration to be "seeing and not seen" is as old as being human. The detection technology in the infrared field is one of the key milestones in the realization of this ambition. The history of this technology shows how difficult the task was.
The aspiration to be "seeing and not seen" is as old as being human. The detection technology in the infrared field is one of the key milestones in the realization of this ambition. The history of this technology shows how difficult the task was.
In World War II, British cities, and London above all, suffered massive bombings by Nazi German planes, and the British feared that the Nazis would eventually invade the island. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to develop means to detect these planes ahead of time, and he used a scientist named Frederick Lindemann for this purpose. Later, a young British scientist named Reginald Jones (Reggie), who is now considered one of the pioneers in the field of infrared detection, entered the picture.
The Vietnam War was another important milestone. The Americans, who suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Vietcong, invested heavily in the development of means that would allow their fighter planes to discover the North Vietnamese army convoys. Thus was born the technological achievement that paved the way for night vision - a crystal made of three elements: mercury, cadmium, tellurium (MCT). The aforementioned technology was published in 1970 by the American scientists Long and Schmitt, and the activity of researchers from the "Hughes Aircraft" company gave another boost to the field.
: 1967 Kidron goes to Minnesota
In 1967, a young professor from the Technion, Yitzhak Kidron, came for a sabbatical at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Kidron joined the laboratories of the "Honeywell" company there, which developed "microelectronics" production technologies.
The invention of the transistor in the early fifties led to the replacement of the bulky radio boxes with compact plastic radio boxes called "transistors". Yitzhak Kidron and his colleagues at the Technion realized that the transistor was the first step in a huge revolution that was then called LSI (Large Scale Integration) and its essence: the inclusion of a large number of transistor devices in density on a single silicon chip. Kidron believed that the security future of the State of Israel lies in this technology.
the smugglers
Yitzhak (Izzy) Kanner was born into an Orthodox family living in Antwerp. He was orphaned by his father on the eve of the outbreak of World War II when he was seven years old, and at the age of ten, Yitzchak was torn from his mother, Toni, when she was taken by the Nazis to her death in the Auschwitz camp. He himself was saved from a similar fate thanks to the initiative of a brave Belgian girl who entered the place of concentration of the Jews pretending to be his mother. Toni, who understood the act, took the cap off the boy's head, kissed him and quietly said "go".
Yitzhak and his two brothers - Deborah and Ze'ev - were smuggled to different hiding places. Isaac himself stayed with a Walloon (Belgian-Catholic) family in the village of Agimont on the French border. Since he did not speak French, he was sent to graze the goats in the fields. After learning French he was sent to study in a monastery. The heads of the monastery, who soon realized that this was an exorcism, responded to the request of the family that "adopted" him and agreed to finance the studies of little Izzy.
The failure of the German attack in the "Battle of the Bulge" in the Ardennes in December 1944, led to the liberation of the area by the American forces. After two and a half years of separation, Uncle Avrom, their father's brother, came to the village and brought back Isaac and his sister
Deborah to free Antwerp. The eldest brother Ze'ev immigrated to Israel, and Deborah also began to prepare for aliyah and received a "certificate" - an aliyah license. Towards that day, Deborah convinced the uncle that it would be better for her younger brother to immigrate to Israel with her.
When they arrived in Israel, the thirteen-year-old Yitzhak was sent to a youth group in the Kiryat Inavim group. "I arrived in 'Zalman pants' and felt the mockery of the Sabrian children," he later said. "But their attitude towards me changed when it became clear to them that I excelled in Algebra and KPF - a face-to-face battle." After about a year, he joined the adult youth group that attended high school in Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, which he had as a home.
Yitzhak enlisted in the IDF when it was established, and he is only 16 years old. Following his brother, he also changed his last name from "Kaner" to "Kedron". During his military service, he completed his studies and matriculation exams, and began studying at the Technion. "The need to learn burns like fire in my bones," he wrote in one of his letters. In 1955 he graduated with honors and was accepted for master's studies at the University of Delft (Delft) in the Netherlands. At the end of his studies he started working as an electronics engineer in the Danish company Disa. There, in Denmark, he met his future wife, Gerda. Yitzhak made it clear to Gerda that he intended to return to Israel, and after their civil marriage, Gerda began a conversion process.
In 1961 they were married a second time, this time in the religion of Moses and Israel, by Rabbi Melchior in the synagogue in Copenhagen, after which they came to Israel and Yitzchak got a job as a lecturer at the Technion. Six years later, with their son Yoram and daughter Dita, they went on that fateful sabbatical year in Minnesota. Upon their return, in 1969, Professor Kidron was assigned a task: establishing a center for microelectronics studies at the Technion. He gathered around him a team of researchers and laboratory workers and allowed students in the Faculty of Electricity to choose microelectronics engineering as a leading major for their professional future.
Yom Hakkipurim War
The Yom Kippur War is today seen as the "watershed" of Israeli security theory. The war dispelled the belief that what worked in the Six Day War would work well in the future as well, and as a result there was an expectation of new technologies that would be an "equalizing factor" between the IDF and the Arab armies. The heads of the defense system realized that one of the key elements in these technologies is night vision, which would enable effective fighting in dark conditions and give Israel a significant superiority.
The Americans' refusal to hand over such detectors to Israel made it clear to the heads of the security establishment that the only way was to develop the detectors in Israel. CEO of Rafael Dr. Ze'ev Bunan and CEO of the Ministry of Defense Zvi Tzur turned to Professor Kidron, who enthusiastically took up this challenge. Already in the same year (1974), Kidron and his colleagues - Shlomo Margalit and Adir Bar-Lev - provided the first detector, which was the seed for the establishment of the Center for Microelectronics. Bunan later said that the success of Kedron and his men in cracking the detector challenge was "of crucial importance in the development of electro-optics in Israel, and he was indeed awarded the Israel Defense Prize for it (along with his colleagues - Shapir, Margalit, Rothstein and Namirovsky). His laboratory, which developed generations of the most advanced detectors, was for all of us in terms of light and darkness." (from "Rafael - from laboratory to campaign").
Kidron's wife, Gerda, said that her husband's motivation stemmed from his life history and the history of his people. "The Holocaust was the main force that motivated him. He swore to himself that there would not be another Holocaust."
Professor Yitzhak Kidron died of cancer in 1987, and he is only 54 years old. Before his death, he managed to raise the financial resources for the construction of the Microelectronics Center building at the Technion.
We thank Legal Oren, whose article "Being Seer and Not Seen", which was published on the website of the Kiryat Tivon Memorial Center, is the basis for this article
