Karl Ferdinand Braun

German inventor and physicist. Braun was one of the great scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and one of the most productive. He discovered the rectifier effect, the basis of modern solid-state electronics&-the seed from which grew today's semiconductors, transistors, silicon chips. He invented the cathode-ray oscilloscope, one of the most useful and versatile scientific instruments of the twentieth century&-and the basis for TV tubes. And he made pioneering and fundamental contributions to wireless telegraphy. Several of his patents were used by Marconi in developing of the radio.

In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize for Phiysics with Guglielmo Marconi.

He died on 20 April 1918, Brooklyn, New York, as a result of a serious accident.