RADIO RESEARCH

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 149, 21 December 1936, Page 15

RADIO RESEARCH

WORK IN GERMANY

N6W ZEALANDER'S RETURN

A New Zealander who has distinguished himself abroad in the scientific world, Mr. David M. Tombs, returned to the Dominion by the Kangitane .last week. A son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Tombs, of Wellington, Mr. Tombs is an old boy of Nelson College, and was awarded by the London County Council in 1934 a Robert Blair Fellowship for the study of ultra-short wireless waves. He has been working in Germany under Professor Zenneck in Munich and under Professor Karl Will Wagner and Professor Leithauser at the Heinrich. Hertz Institute in Berlin. At ( the forthcoming science congress in ' Auckland he will be reading a paper dealing with wireless waves under two metres.

Mr. Tombs went to Germany because the study of problems connected with television in which he is much interested is more advanced there than elsewhere, and for solving television problems it is necessary to know more about short waves themselves. The Heinrich Hertz Institute, which was founded in 1930, has recently had its name changed owing to the German aversion to things and names Jewish. It is devoted wholly to the study of oscillations and is the best equipped and most modern of any such institutes in any part of the world. Commercial firms founded it and take a .practical interest in its work, supporting it financially and seeing that it is furnished with all the latest in the way of apparatus. Patents .arising from inventions and discoveries resulting from work done in it the in question have the first right to. It is a postgraduate institute and Mr. Tombs, 'who had taken " degrees in London, went there as a "science guest." "The, thoroughness of the work done there, remarked Mr. Tombs in conversation with a "Post" representative, is typical of research work as viewed in Germany. Oscillations of all kinds, electrical and otherwise, are studied there—noise, music, vibrations of buildings, etc. The department devoted to acoustics tested materials and buildings for the suppression of e6ho and noise, and they experimented with designs for theatres and other buildings with a view to achieving perfect acoustic properties. Some of the work done which results in-an objective statement as to what is a good or a bad violin, explaining richness and fulness of tone in terms of curves, sounds very remarkable to the layman; so does the institute's invention of the pipeless Olympic organ, each tone of which is produced by a small oscillator.

After renewing acquaintances in New Zealand from which he has been absent for some years, possibly Mr. Tombs will return, for a y time, at any rate, to the fascinating centre of modern research.