Reinhold Rudenberg Totally Explained

Everything about Reinhold Rudenberg totally explained

Reinhold Rudenberg (February 4, 1883 – December 25, 1961) was a German-American electrical engineer and inventor, credited with many innovations in the electric power and related fields. Aside from improvements in electric power equipment, especially large alternating current generators, among others were the electrostatic-lens electron microscope, carrier-current communications on power lines, a form of phased array radar, an explanation of power blackouts, preferred number series, and the number prefix "Giga-".

Early Life and education

Reinhold Rudenberg was born in Hanover, Germany to a family of Jewish descent. His father Georg was a manufacturer, who operated a plant for preparing, cleaning feathers and down goods. His mother was a daughter of the Chief Rabbi of the county of Braunschweig. He attended the Technical University Hanover (then Technische Hochschule), and after receiving his electrical engineering degrees (Dipl. Ing.) and doctorate (Dr. Ing.), both in 1906, he worked for Professor Ludwig Prandtl as a teaching assistant at the Institute for Applied Physics and Mechanics at Göttingen University. There he also attended courses in physics and the celebrated Advanced Electrodynamics course by Emil Wiechert, who only ten years earlier had been one of the discoverers of the electron.
In 1919 Rudenberg married Lily Minkowski, daughter of the Göttingen mathematician Hermann Minkowski and Auguste neè Adler.

Work and research

Rudenberg taught at Göttingen, Berlin, London, and in the U.S. at MIT and Harvard University. At Harvard he was head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Graduate School of Engineering from 1939-1952, when he retired.
   After leaving Göttingen in 1908 he started at the manufacturer of electrical machinery Siemens-Schuckertwerke (SSW), part of the Siemens group of companies, in Berlin. He entered as a machine design engineer, and quickly advanced to head this department. His work soon broadened to include transmission lines, distribution systems, and protective relays and switches. In 1923 he was appointed (research) Director of the Scientific Department (Wissenschaftliche Abteilung) of SSW responsible for the research on and development of machinery and systems for the firm. Simultaneously he was named Chief Electrical Engineer (Chef-Elektriker) of the firm.
   In 1916, Rudenberg designed the electric generator for the main power station in Cologne, then the largest known.
   He had a keen and agile mind, published much and became a prolific inventor. His books, especially on electrical transients, were widely read and used as college texts. Among his contributions were:

Explosives, first analysis of blast overpressure versus energy of charge
Carrier current communications (patent)
Hollow conductors for overhead high voltage power transmission
Electron microscope with electrostatic lenses (patent)
Reversing or Backing of Ships and Propellers
Phased array radar “geoscope” (patent)
Hyperbolic field lenses for focusing electron beams
Electric power directly from atomic radiation (patent)
Explaining the contributing cause of electric power systems blackout

Electron microscope and patents

In 1930, just after returning home from a summer vacation at a Dutch seaside resort, his 2 ¾-year-old son became ill with leg paralysis. This was soon diagnosed as poliomyelitis, which at that time was a frightening disease with a death rate of 10-25% as the disease progressed to the lungs. Polio was then known to be caused by a virus, too small to be visible under an optical microscope. From that time Rudenberg was determined to find or invent a way to make such a small virus particle visible. He thought that electrons, because of their subatomic size, as he'd learned in Göttingen from Wiechert, would be able to resolve such small virus particles, and he investigated ways to focus these to create their enlarged image.
Already in 1927 Hans Busch, his friend since Göttingen, had published an analysis of a magnetic coil acting as a lens. Rudenberg reasoned that an electron beam leaving a point on an object in an axially symmetric electrostatic system could be focused back to an image point if the radial electric field was proportional to the electron distance from the axis. Thus he believed that real magnified images could be obtained under these conditions. As the date of a public lecture on electron optics was approaching Siemens applied for a patent on Rudenberg’s electrostatic-lens instrument on May 30, 1931. Siemens also obtained patents in six other countries. In Germany this, or patents derived therefrom, were granted at various later times from 1938-1954. Some competitors voiced complaints against the Rudenberg patents, but ignored or didn't notice the earlier year (1930) or difference of the stimulus that initiated Rudenberg’s invention, nor would they recognize the technical differences between his electrostatic electron lenses and the magnetic lenses used by others.

Honors

1911 - Montefiori Prize, Institut Montefiore, Liege, Belgium

1921 - Dr.Ing. h.c. T.U. Karlsruhe

1946 - Stevens Institute Honor Award and Medal "For notable achievement in the Field of Electron Optics as the inventor of the electron microscope."

1949 - Cedergren Medal, Sweden

1954 - Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member

1956 - TU Berlin Honorary Senator

1957 - Grand Cross of Meritorious Service of the Federal German Republic, Germany’s GVK medal “Pour le Merite” (Große Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik)

1961 - Eliott-Cresson Medal, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia

Works

Rüdenberg, Reinhold (1916) Artilleristische Monatshefte, No. 113/114, 237-265, 285-316 (in which Rudenberg analyzes the mechanism and the propagation of shock waves from heavy explossions and determines the laws of destruction at a distance).

Rüdenberg,Reinhold (1943) The frequencies of natural power oscillations in interconnected generating and distribution systems. Trans. Amer. Inst. Elec. Engineers 62, 791-803 (In which Rudenberg shows the fundamental period of power surge and sag after a major transient, that may trigger a total blackout).

Rüdenberg, Reinhold (1943) "The Early History of the Electron Microscope", J Appl. Physics 14, 434-436, (in which Rudenberg describes stimulus to begin his work, also patent excerpts showing his electrostatic aperture electron lenses).

Rüdenberg, Reinhold (1945) J. Franklin Inst. 240, p.193ff & 347ff (in which Rudenberg investigates the reversal and the transient behaviour of propellers and ships during maneuvering for controlled rapid action and the prevention of loss of control from propeller "cavitation").Further Information

Get more info on 'Reinhold Rudenberg'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://reinhold_rudenberg.totallyexplained.com">Reinhold Rudenberg Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.