Kolster Radio Corporation

Frederick Augustus Kolster ( born January 13, 1883 in Geneva, † July 23, 1950 in San Francisco) was an American radio pioneer.

As a small child he moved with his parents from Switzerland to Boston, where his father was a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1908 he completed a physics and engineering studies at Harvard.

As a senior staff member of the National Bureau of Standards, he began in 1913 to equip important lighthouses and lightships with beacons. In addition, he invented and developed a direction finder, the Kolster radio compass, which was used in World War I by the U.S. Navy and later found commercial use.