Hendrik de Waard’s home-made TV

It may look a little unsightly, but this box with wires and tubes is a television set from 1948. Nuclear physicist Hendrik de Waard made it at home, using parts from the American army dump. Two years later he built a TV camera which was used to make the very first mobile live broadcast for television.

The man that would become one of the best known physicists of the Netherlands was already a fanatical radio amateur. As early as 1938, when he was still attending the grammar school in Groningen, he was the only one in the north of the country that was able to catch the experimental broadcasts from Philips with a precursor of this tinkered machine.

De Waard also used his love of tinkering in his work as a nuclear physicist. He built an apparatus to measure the polarisation of beta particles. The experiment was an impressive success, although others had gotten there a little bit faster. In the sixties, De Waard was one of the first scientists to research the Mössbauer effect – a phenomenon where an atomic core can absorb and send out gamma rays without losing energy.