The marvelous Mr. MEMs: an ink stain led Kurt Petersen, 2019 IEEE Medal of Honor recipient, to a lifetime of building microdevices

IT WAS 1975, and Kurt Petersen was a smart young researcher, fresh out of the Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at MIT and working in the optics group at IBM's Almaden, Calif., research center. And he was bored. Roaming the massive complex one day, he came across a huge black stain on the linoleum tiles of an otherwise nondescript hallway. That stain would change his life and the course of an entire industry.