Andrew Alford

Andrew Alford (1904 to 1992), born Andrew Petrovitch Alexeievsky in Samara in the Russian Empire, was a Russian-born American electrical engineer and inventor who held more than 180 patents by the time he died. After his parents died in the upheaval of the Russian Revolution he emigrated to the United States as a teenager and graduated from the University of California in 1924. Working at the Fox Film Corporation and the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company, he invented and developed antennas for radio navigation systems, now used in VHF omnidirectional range and instrument landing systems, and he devised the balanced square antenna known as the Alford Loop. During World War II he worked on radar jamming at Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory, and in 1948 he founded the Alford Manufacturing Company. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983 for his Localizer Antenna System.