FERDINAND BRAUN (1850–1918)

Germany enjoyed a period of exceptional prosperity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The country overtook France in many ways, and engineering was one of these. Electrical engineering was a German speciality. Ferdinand Braun was born on 6 June 1850 at Fulda, a Catholic enclave in a Protestant region not far from Frankfurt. His father was a minor civil servant, who married the daughter of his superior. Ferdinand, their youngest son, had, altogether, four brothers and two sisters. After leaving the local gymnasium, Braun began studying physics at the minor University of Marburg but he soon moved to Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1872. Like Heinrich Hertz later on, he became a protégé of Helmholtz. Two years later, as a young gymnasium instructor in Leipzig, he wrote his first book Der Junger Mathematiker und Naturforscher. He then progressed up the academic ladder, being außerordentliche professor first in Marburg and then in Strasbourg, then ordentliche professor first in Tübingen and then back to Strasbourg, where he remained for almost the whole of the rest of his career, during which time the city was in German hands.

Braun was the first to investigate the rectifier effect in semiconductor crystals, the phenomenon behind most solid-state electronics. In 1897, he invented, but refused to patent, the cathode ray oscilloscope, which became the basis for the television tube, computer terminals and many other electronic devices.