Willis Whitfield? Invented the 'Clean Room' -- from Network World:
Sandia Lab celebrates original �Mr. Clean� the clean room inventorOne of those 1,000 little things that enabled today's technology but aren't really in the forefront of our thoughts. Sandia President and Labs Director Paul Hommert had this to say:
Sandia National Laboratories physicist Willis Whitfield, 92, passed away earlier this month and left a technological legacy that continues to reverberate today: The legendary clean room.
The original laminar-flow 10 x 6 clean room developed 50 years ago by Whitfield was more than 1,000 times cleaner than any cleanrooms used at the time and ultimately revolutionized microelectronics, healthcare and manufacturing development. According to Sandia, with slight modifications, it is still the clean room standard today. And one other thing: the invention lead Time magazine in 1962 to dub him "Mr. Clean."
"His breakthrough concept for a new kind of cleanroom, orders of magnitude more effective than anything else available in the early 1960s, came at just the right time to usher in a new era of electronics, health care, scientific research and space exploration. His impact was immense; even immeasurable," said Sandia President and Labs Director Paul Hommert in a release.
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