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Pherdinand BrownGerman physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with Italian Guglielmo Marconi in 1909 for the invention of the wireless telegraph
Date of Birth: 06.06.1850
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Biography of Ferdinand Braun
Ferdinand Braun, a German physicist, was born in Fulda, Germany. He studied at the University of Marburg and completed his doctoral work in physics at the University of Berlin under the guidance of German physicist Georg Quincke. In 1872, Braun received his doctorate degree. He followed Quincke to the University of Würzburg, where he worked as his assistant.
In 1874, Braun became the director of Thomas Gymnasium in Leipzig. During this time, he discovered the property of mineral crystals, such as galena and pyrite, to conduct electric current in only one direction. These laws, discovered by Braun, were later used in detector receivers.
In 1876, Braun returned to Marburg as a professor of theoretical physics and worked there for four years. From 1880 to 1883, he was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Strasbourg, and then from 1883 to 1885, he served as a professor of physics at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. For the next ten years, he worked as a professor of experimental physics at the University of Tübingen and established the Physical Institute there. In 1895, Braun returned to the University of Strasbourg as a professor of physics and director of the Strasbourg Physical Institute, where he conducted his most famous research.
In 1897, Braun invented the oscilloscope, a device in which alternating voltage moved an electron beam inside a vacuum tube with cathode rays. The trace left by this beam on the surface of the tube could be graphically transformed using a rotating mirror, providing a visual representation of the changing voltage. Braun's tube served as the basis for television technology, as the operation of the cathode ray tube is based on the same principle.
Around the same time, Braun began research on wireless telegraphy. Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi had just transmitted wireless messages through the air over a distance of 9 miles. Braun was intrigued by the difficulties Marconi encountered in trying to increase the transmission range simply by increasing the power of the transmitter. Marconi used an electric spark apparatus in his transmitter, generating so-called Hertzian waves (periodic oscillations) that propagated in space. For a while, increasing the "spark gap" did increase the transmission range. However, Braun discovered that when the spark gap became larger than a certain size, the resulting waves interfered with each other, leading to a weakening of the transmission. Within a year, he developed the Braun transmitter, which used a sparkless antenna circuit. In the Braun transmitter, the oscillating circuit that generated the wave energy was connected to the antenna through a magnetic circuit via a transformer, which was previously directly connected to the circuit. A significant feature of Braun's system was the inclusion of a capacitor in the circuit containing a spark gap, which is now used in radio and television transmitters and radars. Furthermore, the insulation difficulties that plagued Marconi's transmitter practically did not exist in Braun's sparkless telegraphy. In Braun's receiver, he used a direct connection between the capacitor circuit and the antenna. The resonance of the oscillation from the transmitting station produced the maximum effect in such a receiving device, which had the same period of oscillation as the transmitting station, in other words, when they were tuned to the same frequency. As a result, it became possible to select the frequency to which the receiving station responded so that signals of another frequency from other transmitters did not interfere with its operation.
Braun obtained a patent for his invention in 1899 and founded the "Telegraph Company of Professor Braun" to implement his subsequent inventions. Among them was the crystal detector, a predecessor to the transistor, which represented a significant advance compared to the coherer used by Marconi. In 1901, he published his articles on wireless telegraphy in a booklet entitled "Wireless Telegraphy over Water and Air." The following year, he demonstrated the first functional transmission and reception of directional wireless communication, using both a directional transmitter and a directional receiver. His final major contribution to science came in 1904 when Braun successfully demonstrated with a narrow-band receiver that both light and electromagnetic waves are equally reflected and absorbed by small grids set at different angles to the incident radiation. This indicated that light consists of electrical oscillations and provided additional confirmation of the theoretical conclusions made in the 1860s by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In 1909, Braun and Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." In his Nobel lecture, Braun quoted his own lecture, delivered in 1890, stating, "Sometimes wireless telegraphy is defined as spark telegraphy, and it has not been possible to do without a spark in one way or another. However, here it has been made as harmless as possible. This is important because the spark that generates the waves also destroys them... What we were striving for would best be characterized as sparkless telegraphy... I am happy to think that we have come considerably closer to this goal and, as a result, have made the transmitter even more efficient."
In 1886, Braun married Amelie Büehler, and they had two sons and two daughters. Known for his pleasant and friendly demeanor, Braun was considered by his colleagues and assistants to be devoid of arrogance and conceit. He enjoyed painting, sketching, traveling, and writing stories for children. In 1914, Braun traveled to New York to testify in a patent dispute. Numerous delays in the case, as well as his own illness, kept him in New York until 1917. As the United States entered World War I in that same year, Braun was not allowed to return to Germany. Falling ill at his son's home, he passed away on April 20, 1918, at a hospital in Brooklyn.