Harold Hopkins (physicist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harold Horace Hopkins (born December 6, 1918 in Leicester , East Midlands , † October 22, 1994 in Reading , Berkshire ) was a British physicist.

Hopkins came from a poor background and studied physics and mathematics at University College Leicester . He graduated in 1939. He then worked for the optics company Taylor, Taylor and Hobson and received his doctorate in 1945. From 1947 he carried out research at Imperial College and gave lectures on optics there. In 1967 he became Professor of Applied Optics at the University of Reading . From 1977 to 1980 he headed the physics faculty there. In 1984 he retired.

Hopkins designed the first workable zoom lens for the BBC , which allowed television to shoot much better outdoors.

In the 1950s, he developed an early endoscope with fiber optic cables , fibroscope called. There were attempts to transmit images with glass fibers earlier, for example in the 1930s by the German medical student Heinrich Lamm , but it was perfected by Hopkins with thousands (instead of only 400 as with Lamm) fibers and a coherent bundling. There were similar developments at that time from other designers such as the Dutchman Abraham van Heel . In the 1960s, in cooperation with the German company Karl Storz, he developed the rigid endoscope with a rod lens system, which he had patented as early as 1959. For medical applications, he continued to improve the system with surgeons at the Royal Berkshire Hospital before the first endoscopes hit the market around 1967.

Hopkins was also involved in the development of the laser disc at Philips in the 1970s , the optical design of which he was able to improve considerably through a mathematical analysis of the system.

In 1962 he introduced Fourier optics techniques and especially the modulation transfer function . For this he received the Thomas Young Prize of the Physical Society of London .

In 1984 he received the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society , of which he was a fellow. In 1990 he received the Lister Medal for the development of the endoscope and in 1978 the Frederic Ives Medal .

Fonts

  • Wave theory of aberrations , Oxford, Clarendon Press 1950

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History of Fiber Optics
  2. ↑ Hopkins, Nature 1954
  3. ↑ History of the development at the Karl Storz company
personal data
SURNAME Hopkins, Harold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hopkins, Harold Horace
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Leicester
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 1994
Place of death Reading