A member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Fergason is best known for his work on an improved Liquid Crystal Display, or LCD.
[3] James Lee "Jim" Fergason was born on a farm near the small town of Wakenda, Carroll County, Missouri.
Fergason married his wife Dora the week after graduation from Mizzou, then reported for a brief tour of duty as a second lieutenant with the United States Army in Texas.
At Westinghouse he began groundbreaking work with cholesteric liquid crystals, forming the first industrial research group into the practical uses of the technology.
Here, in 1969, he made his seminal discovery of a low-power, field-operated LC display, known as the twisted nematic cell, and received a patent.(U.S.
The inventors Martin Schadt and Wolfgang Helfrich[8] of Hoffmann-La Roche had filed a Swiss patent application for the same invention at an earlier international priority date than Fergason in 1970.
Also at LCI, Fergason was part of an effort to use cholesteric liquid crystals for thermal mapping, in particular, to screen for breast cancer.