Walter Bruch

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Walter Bruch (March 2, 1908 - May 5, 1990) was a German engineer, famous for inventing the PAL color television system at Telefunken in the early 1960s. Additionally to his research activities, Professor Bruch taught at Hannover Technical University.

[edit] Biography

Born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Germany, he develops the first important period of his life collaborating with Manfred von Ardenne and Hungarian inventor Dénes von Mihaly, during the decade of 1930s.

In 1935 he started working at Telefunken in the Department of research in television and physics, headed by Professor Fritz Schröter. In the summer of 1936, Olympic Games were held in Berlin, a pioneering date for audiovisual technology. Bruch was able to test on the field the first iconoscopic camera whose development he had contributed. A year later, in the Paris International Exposition, he introduced an iconoscopic television unit he had created.

In 1950, Telefunken commissioned him to develop the first post-war television receptors. Some time later, he committed again to his research in the field of physics and later in the field of color television. He studied and tested thoroughly the American system NTSC and what it would become French SECAM. His work led him to the conception of a new color television system. His creation was based on automatically correcting all color distortion that could occur along the transmission channel.

On 3 January 1963 he made the first public presentation of his Phase Alternation Line System in Hannover to an assembly of experts in the European Radiophonic Union. This can be considered the birth date of the PAL-Telefunken system, later adopted by more than thirty countries (at present, more than one hundred).