Van der Bijl, Hendrik Johannes (1887-1948), was a South African engineer, inventor, and industrialist. He was born on Nov. 23, 1887, in Pretoria, South Africa. He studied science at Victoria College (now the University of Stellenbosch) and then moved to Germany to continue his education and conduct research. He moved to the United States in 1913.
In the United States, Van der Bijl, as an employee of the Western Electric Company in New York City, was partly responsible for setting up the first transcontinental radio link from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. He pioneered the first device for scrambling (putting into secret code) radio speech. He also engineered the first transatlantic wireless transmission of the human voice from Arlington, Virginia, to Paris.
In 1920, he moved back to South Africa and became a technical adviser to the South African government. He was founding chairman of the Electricity Supply Commission and the South African Iron and Steel Corporation. These huge corporations, of which the government was the majority shareholder, launched South Africa’s industrial growth in the 1920’s and 1930’s. During World War II (1939-1945), Van der Bijl was director general of war supplies for South Africa. He died on Dec. 2, 1948.
