In the beginning, televisions were barely smaller than Buicks. They weighed upward of 500 pounds. Finding a spot for them in the house was a challenge.

“Since we got our television set,” a TV World reader wrote to the magazine in 1953, “we’ve had to change the arrangement of furniture in our living room, and we just can’t keep the piano.”

In the 1960s, up to their antennas in complaints about these space- and power-hungry monstrosities, electronics executives and government regulators prodded scientists to find ways to shrink them. Defense officials joined in, hoping for smaller radar screens.

At the center of this herculean effort was Cyril Hilsum, an exuberant British physicist with voluminous, untamed white hair whose striking resemblance to Albert Einstein wasn’t limited to appearance.

“People say Einstein’s I.Q. was 155 or something, and I’d guess that Cyril’s was way higher than that,” J. Cliff Jones, a physicist formerly affiliated with the University of Leeds in England, said in an interview. “I’m not saying Einstein wasn’t extremely important, but Cyril was that kind of man. He was that sharp.”

At the Royal Radar Establishment, a government research center, Dr. Hilsum led the team that developed crucial materials and technology for liquid crystal displays — the screens in flat-panel televisions, laptops and smartphones.