Karl Ferdinand Braun

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Karl Ferdinand Braun
Ferdinand Braun
Ferdinand Braun
Born June 6, 1850
Fulda, Hesse-Kassel, Germany
Died April 20, 1918
Brooklyn, New York
Residence Germany
Nationality German
Field Inventor and physicist
Institution University of Strassburg
Alma Mater University of Marburg
University of Berlin
Academic Advisor August Kundt
Notable Students Leonid Isaakovich Mandelshtam
Known for CRT, Cat's whisker diode
Notable Prizes Nobel Prize in Physics (1909)

Karl Ferdinand Braun (6 June 1850 in Fulda, Germany20 April 1918 in New York City, USA) was a German inventor, physicist and Nobel Prize laureate.

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[edit] Biography

Braun was educated at the University of Marburg and received a Ph.D from the University of Berlin in 1872. In 1874 he discovered that a point-contact semiconductor rectifies alternating current. He became director of the Physical Institute and professor of physics at the University of Strassburg in 1895. In 1897 he built the first cathode-ray tube oscilloscope(1) .CRT technology is to this day used by most television sets and computer monitors. The CRT is still called the "Braun tube" (Braunsche Röhre) in German-speaking countries.

During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless telegraphy. Around 1898, he invented a crystal diode rectifier or Cat's whisker diode. Guglielmo Marconi used Braun's patents (among others). Braun's British patent on tuning was used by Marconi in many of his tuning patents. Marconi would later admit to Braun himself that he had "borrowed" portions of Braun's work. In 1909 Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."

Braun went to the United States at the beginning of World War I to help defend the German wireless station at Sayville, N.Y. (on Long Island) against attacks by the British controlled Marconi Corporation. (At this time the U.S. had not yet entered the war). Braun died in his house in Brooklyn before the war ended in 1918.

[edit] References

1. Keller, P.A., "The 100th Anniversary of the Cathode-Ray Tube," Information Display, Vol. 13, No. 10, 1997, pp. 28-32.

[edit] See also

[edit] External articles and references

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