Thomas Stockham

Watergate investigation Uher 5000 tape recorder, operated by White House secretary Rosemary Wood as part of President Richard Nixon's White House taping system. In 1974, he investigated President Richard Nixon's White House tapes, alongside fellow members of the panel of persons nominated jointly by the White House and the Special Prosecution Force. It was he who discovered that the 18 minutes of erasures were not accidental, as Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods claimed. Stockham was able to discern several distinct erasures and even determined the order of erasure.

Stockham's team reached agreement on seven conclusions detailed in their 87-page report to Chief Judge John J. Sirica:

Development of audio technology Stockham led the development of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format, a user-recordable digital tape that was popular for a time in the 1990s. The continually lowering price of compact discs led to DAT being used only in certain roles, and its last major manufacturer, Sony, phased out development starting in 2005.

Stockham received wide recognition for his pioneering contributions to digital audio. He received, among many others, the Gold Medal award from the Audio Engineering Society in 1987, a Technical Emmy award in 1988, the Poniatoff Gold Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, a Grammy award from NARAS in 1994, the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal in 1998 and a Scientific and Engineering award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999.