Denis M. Robinson

Robinson was born in Pirbright, Surrey, the son of Captain E.H. Robinson. He received his B.Sc.(Eng.) from King's College London in 1928 and his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1930. He also received industrial training at Siemens and Metropolitan-Vickers.

From 1929 to 1931, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Harkness Fellowship, studying dielectric properties of glass under Vannevar Bush.

Robinson initially worked at Callendar's Cable. In the late 1930s, Robinson worked at Scophony Television Laboratory on audio and video electronics for commercial television.

In December 1939, he joined the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), where he became responsible for British work on crystal receivers for centimeter-wave radar. After finding Hans Hollmann's German text asserting that crystal rectifiers made superior microwave detectors, Robinson initiated the British crystal receiver program. Working with physicist Herbert W.B. Skinner, Robinson developed silicon-tungsten crystal detectors. By July 1940, Skinner had devised a method to seal these crystals in glass envelopes for use in flight trials. This work marked a return to semiconductor technology that vacuum tubes had largely displaced, and would shape postwar electronics research.

In August and September 1940, Robinson participated in the Tizard Mission, which shared British radar secrets with the United States. The following year, he was assigned to the MIT Radiation Laboratory as resident British liaison officer, a position he held from 1941 to 1945. His family had already relocated to the Boston area after a German bomb nearly destroyed their home in Swanage. At the Radiation Laboratory, Robinson advocated successfully for American development of microwave air-to-surface-vessel radar for submarine detection.

During his time in the Rad Lab, Robinson also promoted adoption of British crystal detector technology, catalyzing research programs at Bell Labs, Westinghouse, Sylvania, Purdue University, and the University of Pennsylvania. The semiconductor research programs Robinson helped initiate, particularly work on silicon purification and doping, contributed to the foundation for the transistor, developed at Bell Labs in 1947. Robert Buderi credits Robinson's effort with starting American laboratories "fortuitously down the semiconductor path."

In August 1944, Robinson was appointed to the chair of electrical engineering at the University of Birmingham.

Robinson married Alix Casagrande, a sculptor and painter, in 1932. He died in Arlington, Massachusetts, on 25 August 1994. Colleagues remembered him as "a much-admired, soft-spoken leader."