"The inspiration for the optical disk was an illustration in a technical news magazine..."
David Paul Gregg
The DVD disk has its roots way back in 1958 when engineer David Paul Gregg, while working for the U.S. Westrex corporation, had the inspiration to create a new format for audio and video. He had seen an article that showed the results from an early scanning electron microscope, which had lines drawn by the electron beam that were less than a tenth of a micrometer wide. Gregg imagined a plastic disk with tracks written on it that could be read with an inexpensive optical reader—the equivalent of a stylus reading the tracks on a traditional vinyl LP.
Gregg's original concept, which he patented in 1961, was of a transparent disk, through which a concentrated beam of light would be shone and
picked up on the other side by a reader. Like an old LP, his "videodisk" was analog, rather than digital, and included two audio tracks as well as the video. In 1965 Gregg formed his own company, Gauss Electrophysics, and continued to work on refining his invention. He quickly caught the attention of various large corporations including MCA, which bought Gregg's company in 1968.
An extra patent that Gregg received in 1969 became the basis for the Philips Compact Disk, the Sony MiniDisc, and the Pioneer DVD Laser Disc. Today the DVD and its successor, the Blu-ray Disc, are among the fastest growing media formats in history.
