Walter Bruch

Walter Bruch
The „Olympia-Kanone“ (Olympic-Cannon) television camera at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, operated by Walter Bruch.

Walter Bruch (2 March 1908, Neustadt an der Weinstraße – 5 May 1990, Hannover) was a German electrical engineer and pioneer of German Television. He invented the PAL colour television system at Telefunken in the early 1960s. In addition to his research activities Walter Bruch was an honorary lecturer at Hannover Technical University. He was awarded the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1975.

He was born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße, German Empire. At his father's request he attended a business school, but then trained as a machinist apprenticeship in a shoe factory. From 1928 he attended the university of applied science Hochschule Mittweida in Saxony. After that, he was a guest student at the Technical University of Berlin, where he met Manfred von Ardenne and the Hungarian inventor Dénes von Mihály.

From the early 1930s Bruch was involved in the development of television technology: in 1933 he presented a "people's television receiver" with a self-built telecine. In 1935 he started work as a technician in the Television and Physics research Department of Telefunken which was headed by Professor and where developed a special television camera for the 1936 Summer Olympics. The Summer Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin became a milestone for audiovisual technology and Bruch was able to field test the first Iconoscope camera, developed by Emil Mechau based on a tube by . One year later, at the Paris International Exposition, he introduced an iconoscope television unit that he had designed. During World War II he operated a closed-circuit television system installed at the Peenemünde launch site, so that the V-2 rocket launches could be watched at a safe distance from a bunker.