Special Vanguard Award for Outstanding Contribution
by George Winslow -- Multichannel News, 5/19/2008 2:00:00 AM
Richard Leghorn
Founder and Board Member Emeritus
CableLabs
In the 1960s, Richard Leghorn and his wife were constantly upset about the extremely poor television reception at their summer home in Cape Cod, Mass. “You couldn’t get a signal from Boston without a huge antenna,” Leghorn said. “It was ugly. Today, you’d solve that by calling up a cable operator, but back then that wasn’t an option.”
There was, after all, no cable system in Cape Cod. So in 1966, as a kind of hobby, Leghorn, who was already a prominent entrepreneur and defense contractor, built one.
Cape Code Cablevision would be the first of nine systems that Leghorn would eventually own in five states, but his lifelong involvement in the cable industry only deepened when he sold his last system in 1985. By that time, Leghorn had begun a groundbreaking effort to create an industrywide research and development organization.
The result was CableLabs, which was incorporated on May 11, 1988.
“Dick’s vision has been instrumental in making our industry what it is today,” said Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast and the board chairman of CableLabs in a statement. “The product innovation we’re able to offer consumers for video, voice and Internet — and the new business opportunities that have arisen from CableLabs’ efforts — would not have been possible without his leadership.”
Leghorn’s role as “the founding father” of CableLabs, which is being honored this year at the Cable Show with a special Vanguard award, developed out of a long-standing interest in cutting edge technologies.
After getting a degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1939, Leghorn worked at the Eastman Kodak Company until 1941, when he joined the armed forces.
During the war, he was involved in a number of cutting-edge efforts to gain intelligence through aerial photography. Between 1943 and 1945, he commanded the 30th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, which shot film that helped the allies prepare for the D-Day invasion.
After the war, Leghorn became a leading expert on national security, space age technologies and disarmament issues. In 1946, he wrote an influential paper on the need for the U.S. to develop high-altitude reconnaissance planes, a proposal that laid the foundation for the development of the U2 spy plane.
Later, during the Korean War, he played a key role in a group that developed early proposals to use high-altitude vehicles, including satellites, to take pictures of Soviet territory. Ultimately those ideas led to the development of the first U.S. spy satellite system, Corona.
In 1957, Leghorn founded Itek Corp. in 1957 with financial backing from the Rockefeller family. It developed and manufactured the cameras that were used by Corona to shoot the first U.S. spy satellite photos in 1960. “The camera is in the Smithsonian,” Leghorn said. “But you wouldn’t know it was a camera. It’s as big as a room.”
For his contribution to the programs, Leghorn had been honored by the Air Force and inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame.
His interest in pushing the technological envelope also played a prominent role in Leghorn’s cable career.
As he experimented with a number of newer technologies and built cable systems, he grew “quite frustrated with the state of technology in the industry.”
A lot of equipment was unreliable, there were no standards and operators had to deal with many different vendors who had incompatible equipment, he noted.
In 1984, as Leghorn was preparing to sell his last cable system, he saw a potential solution to the problem when Congress passed the National Cooperative Research Act, which made it easier for U.S. companies to cooperate on research efforts without running into trouble with antitrust rules.
In developing the idea of an industry wide research and development organization, Leghorn said he drew on ideas from economist Joseph Schumpeter and systems engineering, which was developed by Bell Labs in the 1920s.
Schumpeter had divided the development of new technologies into three states: invention, innovation and diffusion. Leghorn felt that inventing new technologies was best left to the private and public groups, and diffusion into the marketplace was best handled by private companies reacting to market forces.
But an industrywide group could speed the intermediate state of innovation.
A key part of that process would be the development of standards and an industrywide embrace of the “systems engineering” techniques that had been so successfully used in the telecommunications and information technology sectors.
Leghorn believed that systems engineering would smooth the transition from one technology to the next. Under systems engineering, equipment would be designed so that products from different vendors should work together without problems. New components would be compatible, or interoperable, with existing, older systems and engineers would also take into account possible future developments. That way operators wouldn’t have to replace all their equipment each time they wanted to introduce a new service.
When Leghorn first proposed these ideas in the mid-1980s, however, the industry had other worries. “They were too busy dealing with regulatory issues and buying and selling systems,” he said.
In 1987, however, some of the key regulatory issues had been temporarily solved and cable was more receptive to the idea. Leghorn pitched the idea to the head of the NCTA, James Mooney.
“He felt it was not the right project for the NCTA because of its short term focus on lobbying,” Leghorn said. But Mooney was bullish on the idea and helped put together a committee to explore the idea of creating a R&D organization.
Tele-Communications Inc.’s John Malone agreed to be chairman and other operators quickly signed on. In the summer of 1988, they hired Dick Green as president and CEO. “Dick was the perfect choice” and has been instrumental in much of the organizations subsequent success, Leghorn said.
“Cable has taken more advantage of the potential of cooperative research than any other industry,” Leghorn said. “Twenty years ago cable was being beaten up by broadcasters and the telcos. Today we’re ahead of them, and CableLabs is one of the reasons why.”
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