Leon Harmon

American · 1922–1982

Leon D. Harmon (1922–1982; some sources give 1983) was a Bell Telephone Laboratories researcher in human perception — how brains recognize faces, read handwriting, and process what the eye takes in. His route there was pure mid-century: radio serviceman, then wireman on John von Neumann's IAS computer in 1950, then Bell Labs from 1956, and finally head of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University from the early 1970s until his death. In 1966 he and Ken Knowlton scanned Max Mathews' photograph of choreographer Deborah Hay and remapped its brightness into tiny typographic and electronic symbols on an IBM 7094 with a Stromberg-Carlson SC-4020 microfilm recorder — Studies in Perception I, a five-foot-tall, twelve-foot-wide nude they pasted up as a prank on a colleague's office wall. It ran in the New York Times in October 1967 and hung in MoMA's The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968–69), becoming the most famous computer image of its era. His 1973 Scientific American article on face recognition supplied the coarse-blocked Lincoln portrait that Salvador Dalí borrowed for Lincoln in Dalivision.