Ghanaian born electrical engineer Victor B. Lawrence is to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
[contextly_sidebar id=”ReDhwdbWvZxYPwTRYOuunDPnV5MNBfmz”]Victor B. Lawrence \u00a0together with 15 other inventors will be formally inducted at a ceremony on May 5, 2016,\u00a0at the\u00a0Smithsonian American Art Museum<\/a>\u00a0and the National Portrait Gallery.<\/p>\n Every year, a distinguished group of men and women whose technological innovations have made a significant impact on the world are inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n While Lawrence himself might not necessarily be a household name, his invention of signal processing in telecommunications has had far-reaching impact.<\/p>\n He spent majority of his career at Bell Laboratories and his work essentially made the modern Internet we know today possible.<\/p>\n He improved internet transmission, made high-speed connections more widely available, and kick-started the spread of the web globally.<\/p>\n “This work that I’ve done has really filtered almost every aspect of our modern lives. You can find it in communications in DSL, in phones, in EKG machines in medicine – it really infiltrates all aspects of our lives,” he said.<\/p>\n Lawrence was born in Ghana and attended the Achimota school and graduated in 1962.<\/p>\n According to him one of his driving passions right now is to bring Internet access to the world’s developing countries.<\/p>\n He has been instrumental in trying to extend high-capacity fiber optic cable along Africa’s west coast.<\/p>\n “I have this passion of brining the Internet to the far off nations of this world, and connect a number of countries that have no or limited Internet access, I was so humbled when I found out. I did not believe it, because this is such a great honor,” 2016 inductee Victor B. Lawrence told CBS News. For me, this is something that I was really not expecting, it is really a big honor for me.” he said.<\/p>\n Lawrence developed his signature achievement in the 1980s as the world started moving away from data transmissions bogged down by masses of wires and cords to a more wireless future.<\/p>\n After completing his PhD from the University of London, he was recruited by\u00a0AT&T<\/a>\u00a0with the aim of finding ways, he said, “we could go from the analog world to the digital world.”<\/p>\n Perhaps the central theme uniting Lawrence’s and the other inductees’ work is how their brilliant ideas have spread from the confines of the lab to have a global reach.<\/p>\n The 2016 inductees are: J.D. Albert, Roger Angel, Roger Bacon, Bantval Jayant Baliga, Per-Ingvar Br\u00e5nemark, Barrett Comiskey, Joseph Jacobson, Sheldon Kaplan, Victor Lawrence, Radia Perlman, John Silliker, Harriet Strong, William Sparks, Ivan Sutherland, Welton Taylor, and Robert Thomas.<\/p>\n