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His early schooling also involved a series of setbacks. He excelled at science and raced through algebraic equations in the fourth grade. But his teacher at the time didn’t believe his English was good enough and held him back. “I can honestly say that repeating the fourth grade is what helped me become an engineer,” he said during a talk at Duke University in 2005. “I just wasn’t learning reading and spelling at the same pace I was learning math, and I needed to take that extra year to get caught up.”
programming will be integral to GE’s developments in new machine concepts. Jones also remains committed to promoting STEM education for young people, particularly in underserved communities. He has spent a lot of time with fourthgraders at his old elementary school in Riverhead, N.Y. While at GE, he also recruits students from historically black colleges and helps them follow his own GE GLOBAL RESEARCH
Catch up he did, but his troubles weren’t over. Because his family didn’t have much money, Jones, who loved sports, planned to write his ticket to college as an athlete. But he injured his knee in his junior year of high school. With that avenue blocked, he attended a community college and later bootstrapped his education at the University of Michigan where he was the only African-American student in the engineering school. He went on to earn a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Years later, he self-published the aptly titled children’s book Never Give Up. Dale Lombardo, manager of GE’s Manufacturing Processes Laboratory who worked with Jones, said that “at a time when the original Star Wars trilogy and Superman movies dominated people’s imagination with light sabers and superheroes that could bend steel, Marshall was showing how lasers could perform amazing feats in the real world.” He said that the laser applications Jones has developed “have changed the way manufacturing is done, demonstrating new ways to work with the most difficult advanced materials at a speed, cost, and quality that can’t be beat.” When Jones arrived at the GE labs in 1974, he joined a cadre of scientists who in the 1960s and 1970s pioneered research into semiconductors and lasers, including Nick Holonyak, the inventor of the visible LED, and the late Robert N. Hall, who created the first diode laser. Building on their work, Jones came up with laser beams powerful enough to cut steel, among other innovations. Lasers are at the core of melting metal powders into place to build up parts in additive manufacturing. As industry looks to increase the speed, size, availability, and ease of making 3D-printed components, Jones’s improvements in laser configuration, controls, and SPRING 2017
incredible journey. He told his audience at Duke, “I am certain that my elementary teachers would not have predicted that ‘little Marshall’ would be where I am today.” For more information about Brother Marshall Jones, this year’s class of inductees, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, please visit their web site at http://www. invent.org/. S
Todd Alhart manages General Electric’s Research Lab’s media relations and external communications globally, with a focus on proactively telling GE’s technology story. This story was reprinted with GE’s permission. 51