Albert Bouwers

Albert A. Bouwers (1893–1972) was a Dutch optical engineer. He is known for developing and working with X-rays and various optical technologies as a high-level researcher at Philips research labs. He is lesser known for patenting in 1941 a catadioptric meniscus telescope design similar to but slightly predating the Maksutov telescope.

Biography Bouwers was born in the town of Dalen in the Netherlands in 1893. He obtained his Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 1924, with a dissertation entitled in Dutch Over het meten der intensiteit van Röntgenstralen. He was also the director of the Philips Laboratory's X-ray department.

Bouwers developed a night vision device for viewing in low light conditions, called the "night eye". The design used a photosensitive layer of cesium and antimony in a cathode-ray tube, to brighten images by over 1,000 times. Albert Bouwers built a prototype for a design for a wide field concentric meniscus telescope (patented February 1941)

Bouwers original design (based on an earlier catadioptric telescope, Bernhard Schmidt's "Schmidt camera")