Greenleaf Whittier Pickard

Greenleaf Whittier Pickard was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He was largely responsible and most famous for the development of the crystal detector, the earliest type of diode detector, although he was not the earliest discoverer of the rectifying properties of contact between certain solid materials. The crystal detector was the central component in many early radio receivers from around 1906 until about 1920. Pickard also experimented with antennas, radio wave propagation and noise suppression.