Background

Reinhold Rudenberg was born on February 4, 1883, in Hannover, Germany, the son of a manufacturer.

Education

Riudenberg studied electrical and mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover. Then he passed his final degree examination (1906) and his doctoral examination with distinction.

Career

In 1908 Rudenberg entered the Siemens-Schuckertworks in Berlin as a testing engineer for electrical machines. Later he was placed in charge of the development division of the Berlin plant and served as the firm’s chief electrician. In 1916 he created the world’s first 60-MVA turbine generator for the Goldenberg power station in the Rhineland.

In 1913 Rudenberg became Privatdozent at the Berlin Technische Hochschule. His first lectures dealt with three-phase commutator motors. He was granted the title “professor” in 1919 and named an honorary professor in 1927.

In over 100 publications, including several books, Rudenberg treated heavy-current engineering and, occasionally, light-current engineering as well. His textbook on electrical switching processes was a great success; the first edition appeared in 1923 and the fourth, in English, in 1950. His more than 300 patents record the many contributions he made to all areas of electrical engineering.

In 1936 Rudenberg decided to leave Germany; he went to England, where he worked until 1938 as a consulting engineer for the General Electric Company, Ltd., in London. In 1939 he accepted the Gordon McKay professorship at Harvard. There he lectured on electric machines, on energy transfer, and on switching and compensation processes. In 1952, following his retirement, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, in Rio de Janeiro, and at Montevideo.

Achievements

• Reinhold Rüdenberg's major achievement was in his leadership in electric power technology at Siemens in Germany. He became one of the foremost electrical engineers of his time. Rüdenberg had acquired an excellent working knowledge of optics, mainly during his years at Göttingen. Rüdenberg understood that one key to imaging the poliovirus was the question of resolution - to overcome the limits caused by the relatively large wavelength of light. From this point in his pondering and through to his final designs his main goal was to find a method to overcome this limitation and to maintain a much higher resolution.
  
  He successfully assisted the Farrand Optical Company with the design and development of a new electron microscope. The construction and development of the prototype instrument took place at Farrand's main plant in the Bronx, New York. Rüdenberg provided periodic reports to the team, ranging from an initial analysis of the technical history of developments in electron microscopes in Germany and elsewhere up to that date, to an in-depth analysis of electrostatic microscope design principles and principles of magnetic shielding.
  
  Rudenberg's most important honors were an honorary doctorate from the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe (1921), a medal from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (for his work in 1931 on the development of the electron microscope), and an honorary degree from the Technical University of West Berlin. In 1911 he was awarded the Montefiori Prize by Institut Montefiore, Liege, Belgium. In 1946 Rüdenberg received the Stevens Institute Honor Award and Medal "For notable achievement in the Field of Electron Optics as the inventor of the electron microscope."
  
  He was honored with the title of Technische Universität Berlin Honorary Senator in 1956. In 1957 he was awarded the Grand Cross of Meritorious Service of the Federal German Republic, Germany’s GVK medal "Pour le Merite". In 1961 Rudenberg was a recipient of the Elliott Cresson Medal issued by the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Elektrische Wanderwellen 1962
  • Electrical Shock Waves in Power Systems: Traveling Waves in Lumped and Distributed Circuit Elements 1968
  • Die Relaissteuerungen der modernen Starkstromtechnik 1930
  • Kurzschlußströme beim Betrieb von Großkraftwerken 1925
  • Elektrische Schaltvorgänge und verwandte Störungserscheinungen in Starkstromanlagen 1926
  • Aussendung und Empfang Elektrischer Wellen 1926
  • Elektrische Hochleistungsübertragung auf weite Entfernung 1932

Membership

In 1954 Rudenberg became an Eminent Member of the Eta Kappa Nu (ΗΚΝ) or IEEE-HKN, which is the international honor Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Personality

Rudenberg had a keen and agile mind, which facilitated him to become a prolific inventor.

Connections

In 1919 Rudenberg married Lily Minkowski, daughter of the Göttingen mathematician Hermann Minkowski and Auguste née Adler. The physicist H. Gunther Rudenberg (1920–2009) was the son of Reinhold and Lily Rudenberg.

Mother:

Elsbeth Herzfeld Rudenberg

1858–1947

Wife:

Lily Minkowski Rudenberg

1898–1983

Daughter:

Angelika Rudenberg Howard

1922–1989

Son:

H. Gunther Rudenberg

He was born on August 9, 1920, in Charlottenburg, (Berlin), Germany to botanist Lily Minkowski Rudenberg and engineer and professor Reinhold Rudenberg. While attending the Felsted School in England, his family left Germany to join him in England after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were enacted.

With his parents and two siblings, Angelica and Hermann, they moved to the United States in 1938 after his father was invited to head the department of electrical engineering at Harvard University. Rudenberg received a Master’s degree in physics in 1942 from Harvard. He left his studies to join the United States Army and was stationed in Los Alamos from 1943-1946. He worked on the Manhattan Project, including a role in measuring the atomic blasts at Bikini Atoll.

After the war, he returned to Harvard, graduating with a Ph.D. in electron physics in 1950. After his retirement, he nurtured a passion for the history of science, writing about electron microscopy and the discovery of the electron.

Son:

Hermann Rudenberg

Friend:

Hans Walter Hugo Busch

27 February 1884 in Jüchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany – 16 February 1973 in Darmstadt, Hesse, a German physicist. He was a pioneer of electron optics and laid the theoretical basis for the electron microscope.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 11
  1975