Rudolf Kompfner

Rudolf Kompfner ( born May 16, 1909 in Vienna, † December 3, 1977 in Stanford, California; actually Rudolf Kömpfner ) was an engineer and physicist. He is best known as the inventor of the traveling wave tube ( English: Travelling Wave Tube TWT ).

Life

Kompfner was born on 16 May 1909 as the child of Jewish parents. After a 1933 completed studies in architecture at the Technical University of Vienna, he went (because of the emerging anti-Semitism ) to England, where he worked as an architect until 1941. He always had a great interest in physics and electronics. After a brief internment as an enemy alien at the beginning of the Second World War, he got a job at a secret research project on microwave vacuum tubes at the University of Birmingham. In the course of this work invented Kompfner 1943, the traveling-wave tube. After the war he became a British citizen, continued to work as a scientist for the British Admiralty, and also studied at the University of Oxford Physics, where he in 1951 a Ph.D. degree as obtained.

At the end of this year Kompfner by John R. Pierce was recruited for Bell Labs in the U.S., where he jointly further developed the traveling-wave tube as an important element of the communication age with them. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor for his invention. In 1974 he received the National Medal of Science. He was a member of, among others, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Kompfner died on December 3, 1977 in Stanford, California.

The Rudolf Kompfner Medal of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Technical University of Vienna was named after him.