Gustav Wikkenhauser

The IET's archivist, Jon Cable, looked into his files, Coincidentally, they had been declassified by the National Archives on 30 December 2014, 31 years early from its 100-year classification.

Wikkenhauser retired in 1967. His last application for a patent is recorded on 11 December 1967. He died in 1974, aged 73, while living in Essex.

In March 1956, Wikkenhauser was elected Member of the British Institution of Radio City of London in 1958. The following year he was also voted into the Fellowship of the Institute of Navigation at the Royal Geographical Society, for his contribution so the science of navigation.

In 1947, he left Scophony to work for Kelvin Hughes and became internationally recognised for his investigations in nautical scientific instruments, bringing his knowledge to help with marine radar and echo sounding.

The most complex and perhaps best-known of his varied work was photographic projection display systems for fighter control, used in the post-war revision and upgrading of the UK's early-warning system, the Rotor project. With Albert E Adams, Wikkenhauser's patent for film projection with continuously moving film, filed in 1947 and patented in January 1960, was significant in the Rotor's development. Judkins adds: "The Rotor project involved processing and drying the film involved, and some ten seconds, in order to give real-time controllers."

In the later years of his career, Wikkenhauser's efforts in science and engineering were acknowledged. He was awarded an MBE in June 1946 for his work in technology and science, and married his second wife Pamela that same year.

Because of this letter, in 1941 Wikkenhauser was granted his naturalisation as a British subject and was free to carry out his work without complication of his heritage.

Wikkenhauser was approved for Auxiliary War Work in 1940, in charge of "technical operations".

Bonham-Carter wrote to Fank Edward Smith, Director of Instrumental Production at the Ministry of Supply, in August 1940, on the matter of Wikkenhauser's naturalisation:

Finding Wikkenhauser to be an asset to Scophony's wartime projects, Sir Frank wrote directly to the Home Office in August 1940, stating Wikkenhauser was "a man of great technical ability whose services to the country should be retained, unless there is some serious objection to him as an alien: I have no reason to doubt the good faith of any members of the Company, including Mr Wikkenhauser."

Wikkenhauser applied for naturalisation to become a British citizen in May 1939, four months before the beginning of the Second World War.

He began as an "assistant technical engineer", but soon climbed up, becoming a Fellow of the Television Society in November 1936.

In 1932 he moved from Hungary to England to work on mechanical television, working for Scophony.

Aranka returned to Hungary, and their child Ferenc was born in December 1932. Their divorce was finalised in August 1950.

Bonham-Carter said that Wikkenhauser had no relations and no connections in Germany, and since 1932 had never left Britain (except for brief holidays). By that time, Hungary had joined the Axis powers against the Allied forces. According to international law, Wikkenhauser was liable to civilian internment and could be declared an enemy alien, risking deportation from Britain or a time at an internment camp. It was important to prove that he wasn't anti-British.

In 1931 Wikkenhauser was invited to take up employment at Scophony, in the United Kingdom, where he would work on the early development of television.

He was a pioneer of television in the 1930s, but his work has remained largely unknown because of a "classification" on his National Archives file by the British. He obtained British citizenship shortly after the German invasion of Hungary in World War II, after having failed with a "lukewarm" recommendation from his superiors before the war.

Scophony Ltd was described as "one of the most ingenious television manufacturers of the 1930s". A significant patent from the international company was the Projection Television System; several were installed and ran successfully. But none were sold: the dark day of World War II on the horizon, even the BBC shut down its television experiments.

Wikkenhauser took up a position in Mihály's Telehor Television Company at its start in 1929. He met there GW Walton, a fellow inventor. In the same year, he married a Hungarian woman called Aranka – her maiden name is unknown.

Gustav Wikkenhauser (1901–1974) was a Hungarian engineer, naturalized as a British citizen in 1941.

Wikkenhauser was born in 1901 in Budapest, Hungary. When twenty-six years old, he graduated from the University of Budapest in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. He graduated in 1926, and was employed by Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft AG in Germany. He relocated to Berlin. In his employment there, he built the two 30-line television receivers that the Hungarian engineer Dénes Mihály demonstrated at the 1928 Berlin Radio Exhibition.