Bram van Heel

Abraham Cornelis Sebastiaan "Bram" van Heel (17 July 1899 – 18 May 1966) was a Dutch professor of physics at the then TH (now TU) Delft. He is regarded as the 'father of technical optics in the Netherlands'.

Biography

Van Heel was born in Central Java as the son of Abraham Louis Cornelis van Heel, who was born in Düsseldorf, Prussia in 1867 and was the founder and director of the palm oil factories 'Insulinde' in the Dutch East Indies.

Van Heel studied physics at Leiden, where he graduated and obtained his doctorate in October 1925 with Wander de Haas for his thesis. At Leiden University he became inspired by Nobel Prize laureates Hendrik Lorentz and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, the latter eventually becoming his promotor.

During his studies he spent a year in Paris, in the laboratory of Charles Fabry, the co-inventor of the Fabry-Pérot interferometer, among other things. He also attended lectures there with Henri Chrétien, known, among other things, for the Ritchey-Chrétien telescope.

Van Heel owed his good knowledge of French to this stay in Paris, which contributed to his later international fame in the optical field.

He was one of the founders of two companies in Delft, namely the Optical Industry “De Oude Delft” (later ), and Nonius, which made precision instruments and later merged with Enraf into ). This quote is still prominently displayed at the ImPhys Optica research group at TU Delft. thumb Van Heel quote displayed within the ImPhys Optica research group, TU Delft.