Jean Berchtold

1927 - 2015

Berchtold, Jean LA JOLLA -- Jean Berchtold passed away peacefully on Wednesday, April 29, 2015, surrounded by his family. He was born in Paris in 1927 of a French mother and a Swiss father. Jean spent his early youth in France where his father worked as a banker in Paris specializing in foreign currency trading. The family was vacationing in Switzerland when World War II broke out. They decided not to return to France and took up residence in Zurich, while the father continued to work in Paris, traveling back and forth between the two cities. Jean graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with a degree in chemistry, a science that intrigued him the most. While working on his PhD, he continued to experiment on his own in his home laboratory, which he had set up in the cellar of the family residence. During that time, he developed a copy system, for which invention he obtained patents in several countries and which put him in contact with interested parties in Japan and the US. Jean decided to spend a year in the US, arriving in New York by ship in the winter of 1959. In his little Dauphine automobile, he travelled from Chicago to Mexico City and back, and finally settled down on the West Coast, where he found employment at Bell & Howell Research Center in Pasadena: there he did research on information storage systems and display methods. In 1968, Jean and three friends formed a venture-backed company, Spin Physics, Inc., in San Diego, to develop new magnetic recording heads utilizing unique magnetic materials developed by Jean. They grew the company to 650 employees. At one time, 50% of the broadcast TV hours worldwide were recorded on Spin Physic heads. They sold the company to Eastman Kodak where it became a wholly owned subsidiary. Beyond his contributions to the technical world, Jean is remembered for his kind and humble spirit, his mischievous humor, his seemingly limitless knowledge of science and "how things work," his creative tinkering in the home garage workshop, his insatiable appetite for reading, and so much more. Jean is survived by his spouse of 50 years, Silvia, his son Christophe of Carlsbad with grandsons Shane and Julian, and his daughter Nicole of Laguna Beach with husband Hans Keirstead and grandson Connor. Jean will be missed dearly. A private celebration of his life will be held in June.