About
Zepler.net and zepler.org
Zepler.net is run to provide additional services to all ECS members and alumni.
It is intended to be a replacement for zepler.org. Anyone who has a user@zepler.org email address and web
forwarding set up will have an equivalent user@zepler.net address created here automatically. Any exisiting @zepler.org addresses will still continue to work.
About Zepler
The Zepler Building, home of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, is named after Professor EE Zepler who founded the Department in 1947. We have a fine academic portrait of him in the foyer and this is what its says beneath:
Professor E E Zepler (1898-1980)
Emeritus Professor Eric Ernest Zepler made an outstanding and pioneering
contribution to radio receiver development as well as to the teaching of
electronics.
After studying Physics at the University of Berlin and Bonn he took a DPhil
at the University of Wurzburg. He then continued his research at the
Physical Institute, Wurzburg until joining the staff of Telefunken, Berlin,
in 1925. He became head of the radio receiver laboratories but in 1935 he
was forced to flee the country with his family and came to England as a
refugee. He obtained a post with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.
The results of his work were described authoritatively and with enviable
clarity in his first book "The Technique of Radio Design" first published
in 1943 and running to three printings. This book was a classic and
remained the standard reference for nearly twenty years - a remarkable feat
in a subject which was developing so very rapidly.
Zepler's name is associated with many famous radio receivers and
transmitters, for example the 1155 and 1154 used by Bomber Command during
the war. In fact equipment of his design was used by both the Royal Air
Force and the Luftwaffe.
From 1941 to 1943 Eric Zepler was a lecturer in the (then) University
College, Southampton, before moving to the Cavendish laboratory at the
University of Cambridge. Three years later he returned to Southampton and
in 1947 he founded the Department of Electronics. In 1949 a Chair of
Electronics was created for him.
This chair and the new Department were the first in Electronics in this
country, and probably in the world. The Southampton Postgraduate Diploma in
Electronics became renowned as the outstanding qualification for
professional electronics engineers in the United Kingdom.
Eric Zepler took a leading role in establishing electronics as a separate
and "respectable" discipline from traditional electrical engineering. To
this end he was an enthusiastic member of the Institution of Electronic and
Radio Engineers helping to formulate the Institutions educational policies,
and became its president in 1959-60.
On his first retirement in 1963 he began a completely new career in the
University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. He concentrated on
problems of hearing and made many fundamental contributions to our
understanding of the way in which the ear responds to impulsive sounds.
Chess was one of his principal enthusiasms. He published books on chess and
played for the Essex and Hampshire County teams. He was granted the title
of International Master of Chess Composition.
An honorary degree of Doctor of Science was conferred on him in 1977.
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