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RUDOLF KOMPFNER
1 909-1977
BY JOHN R. PIERCE
RUDOLF KOMPFNER known universally as Rudi, Professor
Emeritus at Stanford University, Quondam Fellow of All Souls
College, Oxford, was born in Vienna, Austria, on May 16, 1909; he
died suddenly of a heart attack at the Stanford University Medical
Center on December 3, 1977.
Rudi Kompfner is known especially for his invention of the
traveling-wave tube and the backward-wave oscillator; for his work
on satellite communication, in which the traveling-wave tube has
played an important part; for work on light-wave communication
and optical fibers; and for contributions to acoustic microscopy. He
was a scientist, engineer, and inventor with a great enthusiasm in
his life and work and a great talent for friendship and the inspira-
tion of others.
The seemingly diverse elements in Dr. Kompfner's life were
welded into an unforgettable personality through a constancy of
interest expressed during a diversity of circumstances. The con-
stancy of interest included his technical work; his family life; and
his love of music, skiing, swimming, good company, and good food.
The diversity of circumstance was great. Immediately after
World War I, when the Allies still blockaded Austria, Dr.
Kompfner was sent to stay with a Swedish family in order to escape
starvation, for which we should all be eternally grateful. With an
enthusiasm for physics inspired partly by reading the works of
Arago as a young man, he was not permitted to pursue this career.
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Rather, he studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in
Vienna, becoming a Diplom-lngenier in 1933. He then emigrated
to the United Kingdom, where he was an architectural apprentice
with P. D. Hepworth in London from 1934 to 1936. He was
Director, Almond Franey and Sons, Ltd., Builders, London, in
193~1941. During this period, he not only designed buildings that
still stand, but he also studied electron tubes in the Library of the
Patent Office in Chancery Lane. This led to the publication of
several papers and to his patenting a novel television pickup tube.
Early in World War II, Or. Kompfner was interned briefly on the
Isle of Man as an enemy alien. This gave him an opportunity to
think about physics and to study with interned German physicists.
In the summer of 1941, he was given a job with the Admiralty, to
work on microwave tubes at the Physics Department of Birming-
ham University under Professor M. L. Oliphant. The work there
on high-power magnetrons for radar was a revelation to him. But
the fruitful outcome was the invention of the traveling-wave tube,
while trying to make a better klystrom amplifier for radar re-
ceivers. His fundamental idea—the continuous interaction of an
electron stream and an electromagnetic wave of the same velocity
traveling along a helix was ingenious, and the realization worked!
In 1944 Dr. Kompfner was transferred, still as an employee of
the Admiralty, to the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford. There he
was haunted with the idea of a voltage-tunable traveling-wave
oscillator. His interest persisted through the period during which
he studied for his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics, which he
obtained in 1951. He made some theoretical and experimental
progress toward his end, partly in collaboration with F. N. H.
Robinson of SERL (Services Electronics Research Laboratory) at
Baldock.
In 1950 Dr. Kompfner left the Admiralty and became associated
with the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, but he continued
to work at the Clarendon Laboratory on microwave tubes. In 1951
he accepted employment at Bell Laboratories and arrived at Mur-
ray Hill, New Jersey, on December 27, 1951. There he found the
facilities necessary to continue his work on tunable traveling-wave
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oscillators, and in a short time he had demonstrated electronic
tuning over an unprecedented range of 10,000 megahertz a
wave-length range from 6.00 to 7.50 millimeters.
His interest in microwave tubes extended over many years, and
his contributions were various, including the use of coupled helices,
novel means of focusing (slalom focusing), understanding of noise,
and the effects of nonreciprocal loss. Eventually, he assumed
greater responsibilities, becoming Director of Electronics Research
in 1955, Director of Electronics and Radio Research in 1957 and
Associate Executive Director, Research, Communication Sciences
Division, in 1962.
In 1958, together with I. R. Pierce, Dr. Kompfner became
interested in communication satellites. In 1959 they published a
paper outlining the potentialities of such satellites. The Bell Labo-
ratories work on the Echo satellite, which was launched on August
12,1960, was carried out in Dr. Kompfner's department and under
his direction. He was also deeply involved in the Telstar
experiment—the launching by AT&T in 1962 of a satellite that
carried live television across the Atlantic for the first time.
In the late fifties, Dr. Kompfner became enthusiastic about
communication using light waves. His leadership played a large
part in the exploration of various possibilities, which led ultimately
to the first use of light-wave communication to carry commercial
telephone traffic in Chicago in 1977.
In June 1973, Dr. Kompfner retired from Bell Laboratories.
Thereafter he divided his time between Stanford University, where
he became Professor of Applied Physics and, almost immediately,
Emeritus Professor, in 1974, and Oxford, where he was Fellow of
All Souls- the first engineer and architect since Christopher Wren,
among classicists and humanists and Professor of Engineering
Science.
In this later period, Dr. Kompfner's chief interests were divided
among work at Oxford on ingenious ideas concerning the use and
interconnection of optical fibers and work at Stanford, chiefly in C.
F. Quate's program on an acoustical microscope. He had had an
enthusiasm for this field as early as 1966, when he talked of a
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program with Quate, Joseph Pick, and Marvin Chodorow. He
contributed a number of ideas in this area, including observation
by means of harmonics and means for improving depth of focus.
Dr. Kompfner's work received widespread recognition. In 1955
the (British) Physical Society awarded him the Duddell Medal.
Happily, this led to his delivering and writing a lecture, "Some
Recollections of the Early History of the Traveling-Wave Tube."
He later wrote a short book, The Invention of the Traveling Wave Tube
(San Francisco Press, 1964~.
Dr. Kompfner was awarded the National Medal of Science
(1975), the David Sarnoff Award (1960), the Medal of Honor of the
IEEE (1973), the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute
(1960), the John Scott Award (1974), and the Sylvanus Thompson
Medal from the Routgen Society, Incorporated, with the British
Institute of Radiology (1974~. He was awarded an Honorary Doc-
torate of Science by Oxford University in 1969 and an Honorary
Doctorate of Technical Science from the Technische Hochschule in
Vienna in 1964—not as a former student of architecture, which
would have been inadmissible, but allowable because he had never
been a student of physics in that institution.
Dr. Kompfner was a member of a number of societies and
institutions: The National Academy of Engineering, the National
Academy of Sciences, the Physical Society (British), and a Fellow of
the IEEE. He served these organizations and his country in a
number of ways. In the National Academy of Engineering he
served as a Member and Chairman of the Awards Committee, as a
Member and a Vice-Chairman of the Aeronautics and Space En-
gineering Board (ASEB), and as a Member of the Selection Commit-
tee for the Zworykin Award. He also served the NAE Committee on
Science and Public Policy, the Space Science Board, and the
Academy Forum General Science Advisory Committee. He was a
Member of the Trustees of the Associated Universities, Inc. He was
made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS) in 1974.
His countries and many individuals owe Rudi Kompfner a great
debt of friendship and inspiration. A good part of this writer's
career was built on Rudi's invention of the traveling-wave tube.
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Rudi's career exemplifies the benefits that this calling can bring to
society. He, himself, summarized the personal rewards:
The feeling one experiences when he obtains a new and important insight,
when a crucial experiment works, when an idea begins to grow and bear
fruit, these mental states are indescribably beautiful and exciting. No
material rewards can produce el'f'ects even distantly approaching them.
Yet another benefit is that an inventor can never be bored. There is no
time when I cannot think of' a variety of' problems, all waiting to be
speculated about, perhaps tackled, perhaps solved. All one has to do is to
ask questions, why? how? and not be content with the easy, the superficial
answer.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
electronics research
