Karl Ferdinand Braun

Karl Ferdinand Braun was born on 6 June 1850 in Germany and worked as an applied physicist at a time when wireless communication was still theoretical. In 1874 he constructed the first semiconductor diode, a quiet landmark that would eventually open the door to all of electronics. Twenty-three years later, in 1897, he built the first cathode-ray tube - the ancestor of every television screen for the next century. His two-circuit system made long-range radio transmission practical, and in 1905 he invented the phased array antenna, the architecture underlying radar and modern smart antennas. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi for their work on radio, co-founded Telefunken, and died on 20 April 1918, leaving behind the infrastructure of the connected world.