Gustav Guanella

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Dr. hc Gustav Guanella

Gustav Guanella (born June 21, 1909 in Chur ; † January 12, 1982 in Zurich ) was a Swiss electrical engineer and inventor .

Life

Guanella attended schools up to and including Matura in Lucerne. Then he studied electrical engineering at the ETH Zurich , graduating in 1933. There he was assistant to Fritz Fischer , the inventor of the Eidophor large projection system, at the Institute for Technical Physics until 1937 . He then worked as a freelance consulting engineer. Since 1935 he was the brother-in-law of Albert Hofmann , the discoverer of LSD . In 1938 he married Hanni Zietzschmann. In 1941 he joined Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC), Baden.

As early as 1943 he was appointed head of the small high-frequency device department. In this role, he worked for the BBC as an inventive inventor and valued manager until 1974. He made a significant contribution to the development of electronic high-frequency technology .

Services

In addition to senior assistant Edgar Gretener (from 1941 with his own company of the same name) Guanella together with Werner Lindecker , Hugo Thiemann and Max Lattmann , an extraordinarily capable team were scientific employees at the Fischer Institute at the ETH .

Guanella was the first to venture into self-employment in 1937 and, before later joining the BBC, made many inventions for which patents were filed under his name or the name of the clients at the time (Philips, SABA, AEG and even BBC). Up to 1941 there were over 40 applications on Espacenet of the European Patent Office.

On August 23, 1938, Guanella filed a patent application with the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, which led to patent GB 534036 in 1941 under the title Improvements in radio direction finding system .

With priority date September 26, 1938, he filed a patent application in Switzerland with the title Method and device for the detection and measurement of the distance of reflection points . Corresponding patents have been granted in Switzerland (CH 220877) as well as in France, Great Britain and the USA.

On May 12, 1940, a related application was made to display a searched object on a screen tube. The corresponding patent CH 220780 bears the title Method and device for indicating the direction of waves of periodically variable frequency .

The patents mentioned relate to location and later radar technology, which were important at the time of the Second World War.

During his work at the BBC from 1941 he made many other inventions and patent applications.

On February 3, 1942, his patent application with the title Method for the transmission of messages that are disguised with the help of control signals was filed in Switzerland and granted in 1952. The method described later became very important as direct sequence spread spectrum transmission DSSS (German: Frequency spreading method) in interception-protected wireless transmission. The corresponding US patent 2,405,500 was issued in 1946.

In the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook by M.Simon et al. Guanella is honored with a photo and instructions (pages 43, 44, 121) as a Swiss pioneer of noise-modulated radar and speech privacy systems .

Guanella became best known through the invention of impedance converters for high-frequency technical adaptation at interfaces, so-called current baluns , which are still known today as Guanella balun . The corresponding patent application under the title In an electrical network switched transmission device with line character was made in Switzerland on February 25, 1944 (CH 242060). Corresponding patents have been granted in other countries, in particular US Pat. No. 2,470,307.

Further inventions concerned the frequency negative feedback for interference-free reception, phase discriminator circuits , the beacon control of an anti-aircraft missile and pulse modulation ( pulse phase modulation , PPM).

His team at BBC developed successful products for the radio link transmission of voice and data, which were in military and civil use for many years. Guanella wrote the foreword to a special edition of the Brown Boveri Mitteilungen , which describes the state of the radio link in 1956.

Special radio systems for police, fire brigade, port administration and taxi networks at home and abroad were also part of the success of his department at BBC. In total, he has registered more than 200 patents (including related foreign patents), partly together with work colleagues as inventors.

Honors

In 1965 he was named a Fellow of the IEEE by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his services .

In 1969 the ETH, Zurich, together with his brother-in-law Albert Hofmann (the Swiss discoverer of the effects of LSD ) awarded him the title of Dr. Honorary engineer (Dr. Ing.hc).

A laboratory and office building for the company Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), the legal successor to BBC, in Turgi in the canton of Aargau was named in honor of Guanella Gusti .

See also

literature

  • Peter Josef Wild : What was before the cell phone? - Telecommunications at the BBC . In: Franz Betschon et al. (Ed.): Engineers build Switzerland - first-hand history of technology , pp. 408–414, Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-03823-791-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ patent GB534036 : Improvements in radio direction finding system. Published on February 26, 1941 , inventor Gustav Guanella. ‌
  2. ↑ Patent CH220877 : Method and device for the detection and measurement of the distance from reflection points. Published April 30, 1942 , inventor: Gustav Guanella. ‌
  3. ↑ Patent CH220780 : Method and device for indicating the direction of waves of periodically changing frequency. Published April 30, 1942 , inventor: Gustav Guanella. ‌
  4. ↑ Patent DE846562 : Method for the transmission of messages that are disguised with the help of control signals. Registered February 3, 1942 , published August 14, 1952 , inventor: Gustav Guanella. ‌
  5. ↑ Dietmar Rudolph: Spread spectrum modulations. (PDF) In: Scripts for “Digital Radio Systems” (DFS). Winter semester 2004/2005. Retrieved October 4, 2012 .
  6. ↑ Patent US2405500 : Means for and method of secret signaling. ‌
  7. ^ Marvin K. Simon, Jim K. Omura, Robert A. Scholtz, Barry K. Levitt: Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook, Electronic Edition . McGraw-Hill Prof Med / Tech, 2001, ISBN 978-0-07-138215-1 , 2.1.1. Radar inovations , S. 44 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ^ G. Guanella: New method of impedance matching in radio-frequency circuits . In: The Brown Boveri Review . tape 31 , September 1944, p. 327-329 .
  9. ↑ Patent CH242060 : Transmission device with line character switched on in an electrical network. Published April 15, 1946 . ‌
  10. ↑ Patent US2470307 . ‌
  11. ↑ Brown Boveri Mitt., Volume 43 (1956), No. 9, pp. 343-398.
  12. ↑ Patent Search for "Gustav Guanella" at Espacenet
personal data
SURNAME Guanella, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss electrical engineer and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Chur , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 1982
Place of death Zurich , Switzerland