Dr. Valerie Thomas

 

Dr. Valerie L. Thomas, a Baltimore native, invented the Illusion Transmitter, which transmits images like a TV does but displays them in the air instead of on a screen. It is like having 3D without needing special glasses. Growing up, Dr. Thomas had a passion for science.  As a very young kid, Dr. Thomas had been exposed to optics while watching her father enlarge photos with an enlarger that he had built. And because of her physics experience in an all-girls high school, she chose physics as a major at Morgan State College. It was in an Optics class at Morgan that she first learned about real images but was not clear about the concept.  After graduation, she worked as Mathematician at NASA.  In the early 1970s, she started managing the development of data systems for Landsat satellites, which took digital images of the earth’s resources.  It was at a non work related informal demonstration of a real image in the mid ’70s that her eyes and mind were in conflict about what she had seen.  Her curiosity and perseverance lead to her patent of the Illusion Transmitter, which she worked on at home with the help of her 4 year old son.