Walter Rogowski

Walter Rogowski ( born May 7, 1881 in Wesel- Obrighoven, † March 10, 1947 in Aachen ) was a German electrical engineer.

Life and work

From 1900 he studied physics at the Technical University in Aachen with Arnold Sommerfeld. After completing his bachelor's degree in 1902, he went to the Technical University of Gdansk. After graduating in 1904 he worked there as an assistant, and in 1907 received his doctorate. In 1909 he was a research assistant at the Physical Technical Institute in Berlin, where he conducted research in the field of power engineering, telecommunications and electrical physics. Here he made in 1912 the Rogowski coil known. Also, the Rogowski profile, a special form for electrodes, goes back to his work.

In 1919 he became a professor of engineering physics at the University of Jena .. Only a year later Rogowski was appointed at the Technical University of Aachen as Professor of General and Theoretical Electrical Engineering and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering. Under his leadership, a high-performance cathode-ray oscillograph was developed, the time course of a traveling wave has been demonstrated experimentally for the first time with the 1925.

From 1927 he worked on similar Eugen Flegler and Rudolf Tamm with the question of increasing the intensity of an electron beam deflection by 1927 he included a second short coil between the cathode and anode aperture. This should emanating from the cathode ray beam to focus on the small opening of the anode panel, so that the writing beam outgoing from it was a very high current strength.

In the same year the Norwegian Rolf Wideröe earned him his doctorate with a thesis on an electric particle accelerator. The publication in the Archives of Electrical Engineering Ernest Lawrence gave the idea of ​​the cyclotron.

Although Rogowski had joined the NSDAP in 1933, he largely abstained from politics and focused instead on his research. When he was deposed, first to Belgium in 1944 during the evacuation of the TH, he was arrested at the instance of the Rector Hans Ehrenberg by the Gestapo. After a brief preventive detention but he went to Hann - Munden, where his institute had been swapped among others, and took his regular work again.

For his services Rogowski was in 1932 for Dr. hc the TH Darmstadt and in 1938 made ​​an honorary member of the Association of German Electrical Engineers and in 1947 honored as the namesake of the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the RWTH Aachen.