Hew Crane is one of SRI’s visionaries, combining several disciplines into his multilevel career, characterized by his superb creativity, his organizational skills, and his ability to mold young talent into strong working teams. Hew’s PhD thesis—still quoted today—was on his concept of the Neuristor, a hypothetical device modeled after the human nerve cell—the neuron. Hew showed that all the functions of a modern digital computer could be implemented using only a combination of neuristors.
Hew Crane always liked to work on anything that could help people. In the opinion of many, he was SRI’s first bioengineer. In the 1960s, SRI’s biotechnology capabilities expanded. With Don Kelly and Tom Cornsweet, Hew organized a Visual Sciences Program. He recruited young PhDs and recent MDs to begin developing novel instruments for measuring the fundamentals of human vision. The most successful of these instruments was the SRI Purkinje Image Eye-Tracker, which could measure the pointing direction of the eye with about ten times the accuracy of any current instruments. When other organizations wanted their own units, Hew built four more units, which he thought would provide all the instruments needed by vision researchers. The eye-tracker was then combined with another new instrument—the SRI optometer in a binocular arrangement that allowed a vision researcher to track, in real time, the exact point in three-dimensional space where the eyes were focused. SRI designed, constructed, and delivered 30 instruments—each a project averaging over $100,000— before an outside company was licensed to take over the manufacturing.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hew developed a new approach to recognizing handwritten characters that would allow automatic input of handwritten information to a computer. Hew’s system found a strong market in Japan, where the usual keyboard was not useful for a language that uses about 2000 Chinese characters plus about 100 phonetic characters. For the first time, SRI established a spin-off, Communication Intelligence Corporation (CIC). Hew joined CIC half time as their technical vice president. Later, SRI’s stock in CIC was sold at a substantial profit.
Hew Crane, one of SRI’s most prolific inventors, has left behind a challenge to all to emulate his combination of multidisciplinary inventiveness, organizational skills, and leadership that can take SRI on to even more advanced achievements.