tiny neon tubes as the organ’s sound source. It showed, however, that pitch maintenance was a serious problem.²⁰ In his electronic organ Kock made use of the formant concept. One of the first to employ this was Karl Willy Wagner, Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and from 1930 onwards Director of the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Vibration Research. In his research Wagner described the vocal resonances which were responsible for the tone quality of vocal sounds. By passing an electrical signal rich in harmonics through a network of resonant electrical circuits he synthesized the various vocal sounds and greatly aided the study of speech sounds. At the same time as Wagner conducted his research on vocal resonances the German electrical engineer Friedrich Trautwein from Berlin put forward a similar concept regarding musical instruments. Trautwein proposed the term ‘reverberation formants’ (Hallformanten) for damped oscillations of a definite frequency which are invariably higher than the fundamental. As in his Trautonium this led to interesting applications of electrical resonant circuits to produce, electrically and in electronic musical instruments, the resonances contained in conventional instrumental sounds.²¹ Kock received his electrical engineering diploma in 1932 and his Master of Science degree in 1933.

In the spring of 1933, after finishing his studies in Cincinnati, he became exchange fellow at the Technical University of Berlin with the arrangement to conduct doctoral research at the Heinrich Hertz Institute with Karl Willy Wagner. Incidentally, Kock’s counterpart as an exchange student from Berlin to Cincinnati was Siegesmund von Braun, Werner von Braun’s eldest brother. In Berlin Kock wrote a Ph. D. thesis on oscillations in inductive glow discharge circuits and, with Oskar Vierling, designed an improved electronic organ on the formant principle. Again it used neon tubes in an improved discharge circuit capable of large timbre variations. With these circuits relatively even sine wave currents could be produced.

The Heinrich Hertz Institute with its liberal and highly renowned director Karl Willy Wagner was an excellent place to pursue this sort of research. Contrary to the Bell Laboratories, where it was not encouraged, the institute considered it as a legitimate part of the research agenda. It was no luxury, but of great interest to the fields of high frequency physics, acoustics and electronic engineering, generating knowledge which in its original or modified form could be applied to different kinds of projects.²²

After having obtained his Ph. D. Kock left Berlin in 1934, spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Indian Research Institute in Bangalore. The latter stay, during which made an analysis of the piano string considered as an electrical transmission line, was financed by the Baldwin Piano Company in Cincinnati. Back in the United States he in 1936 became research director of this firm. During his time at Baldwin and based on his research in Berlin he developed an electronic organ which was patented in 1941. Obviously, times of war were not conducive to building and marketing electronic