Walter Bruch was born on March 2, 1908, and died on May 5, 1990. He was a German electrical engineer who helped develop television in Germany. He invented closed-circuit television. He created the PAL color TV system while working at Telefunken in the early 1960s. In addition to his research, he was an honorary lecturer at Technische Hochschule Hannover. He received the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1975.
Biography
He was born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße, which was part of the German Empire. At his father's request, he attended a business school, but later completed a training program as a machinist apprentice in a shoe factory. From 1928, he studied at the Hochschule Mittweida, a university of applied science in Saxony. After that, he became a student visitor at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), where he met Manfred von Ardenne and the Hungarian inventor Dénes von Mihály.
In the early 1930s, Bruch worked on developing television technology. In 1933, he presented a "people's television receiver" that he built himself, including a telecine he designed. In 1935, he began working as a technician in the Television and Physics research department of Telefunken, which was led by Professor Fritz Schröter. At this time, Emil Mechau developed a special television camera for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. These games marked an important moment in audiovisual technology, and Bruch helped test the first Iconoscope camera, which was created by Emil Mechau using a tube developed by Walter Heimann. In 1936, he introduced an iconoscope television unit he designed at the Paris International Exposition. During World War II, he managed a closed-circuit television system at the Peenemünde launch site, allowing people to watch V-2 rocket launches safely from a bunker.
In 1950, Telefunken asked him to design the first television receivers after the war. Later, he returned to physics research and worked on color television. He studied and tested the American NTSC system and what became the French SECAM system. His work with colleagues like Gerhard Mahler and Dr. Kruse led to the creation of a new color television system that automatically corrected for a type of distortion that could happen during transmission.
On January 3, 1963, he gave the first public demonstration of the Phase Alternation Line System to experts from the European Broadcasting Union in Hannover. This date is considered the start of the PAL-Telefunken system, which was later used by more than thirty countries (now over one hundred). When asked by German talk show host Hans Rosenthal why he named it the "PAL system," Bruch explained that no German would want a system named after his last name, "Bruch," which means "broken" in German.
He received the David Sarnoff Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1971 and the Eduard Rhein Ring of Honor from the German Eduard Rhein Foundation in 1981. He died in Hanover at the age of 82.
Awards
- 1967: Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
- 1968: Goldene Kamera 1967 (Golden Camera 1967)
- 1973: Culture Award, German Society for Photography
- 1975: Werner von Siemens Ring
- 1979: Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria; Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold
- 1982: Niedersächsischer Staatspreis (Lower Saxony State Prize), for Science
- 1986: Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art