As a child, Friedrich Trautwein learned to play the organ in church. He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, followed by law and physics in Berlin and Heidelberg. In 1906, he joined the
Teutonia fraternity in Karlsruhe. He passed the traineeship examination for the higher postal service in 1911. During WWI, he was a lieutenant in charge of a mounted radio squad. After passing the assessor exam in 1919, he went on to study physics in
Heidelberg and
Karlsruhe, where he earned his doctorate in engineering. He began working as a postal clerk at the
Telegraphentechnisches Reichsamt the following year. In this capacity, he was involved in the establishment of the first German radio station, which was based in Berlin's Vox building. He was also dealing with electrical sound generation at the time, where he received his first patent for his research in 1922. In 1929, he accepted a lectureship at
Berlin's Academy of Arts and started the development of the
Trautonium, which it would be finished in 1930. Trautwein was involved in the instrument's further development until around 1933, after which
Oskar Sala continued to work on it independently. In 1933, he joined the
NSDAP, which later became the
SA. Trautwein started working at the Image and Sound Academy BIKLA in
Düsseldorf in 1949, but it quickly closed down. Subsequently, Trautwein went to the Düsseldorf Conservatory (now the
Robert Schumann Hochschule) with his students and established the foundation for a degree in audio and video technology that still exists today. Another musical instrument, the electronic
Monochord, was developed in
Cologne in 1952 as a further development of the
Trautonium and allowed dynamic variations in the shape of the sound envelope. == Literature ==