Leon Harmon

Who was Leon Harmon?

Leon D. Harmon was a researcher in mental/neural processing, particularly regarding vision, who worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated.

Harmon started his career as a radio serviceman and electronics hobbyist. In 1950, he went to work as a wireman on the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked for Julian Bigelow and encountered John von Neumann and Albert Einstein. At the same time he began taking night courses in engineering at New York University. When the IAS project ended in 1956, he joined Bell Laboratories where he worked on human perception, computer vision and graphics.

In 1966, Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton were experimenting with photomosaic, creating large prints from collections of small symbols or images. In Studies in Perception I they created an image of a reclining nude, by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities.