Richard F. Lyon
American inventor
Richard Francis Lyon (born 1952) is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer. He is one of the two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices in 1980. He has worked in signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon, Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.
Early life and education
Lyon grew up in El Paso, Texas, as the third of nine children. His father, an engineer for the El Paso Electric Company, brought home an early Fortran programming manual to encourage his family's members to explore their interests in electronics.
Lyon attended Caltech to earn a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, graduating in 1974. While at Caltech, Lyon worked with Carver Mead and John Pierce. He took a summer internship at Bell Labs, where he developed digital signal processing hardware for audio applications. He then enrolled in the graduate program at Stanford University intending to earn a PhD, but left with a master's degree in 1975 to work in Silicon Valley.
Career
After Stanford, Lyon worked at Stanford Telecommunications, a small start up company developing signal sets for navigation satellites and Space Shuttle communication systems.
The public source identifies “Richard F. Lyon” as american inventor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Richard, Lyon and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7325763. VIAF identifies the subject as 32147422897444880542. The Library of Congress control number is no2016120038. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1980, 1974 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard F. Lyon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.