Polish Genius : Stefan Kudelski / NAGRA

A brilliant designer, the first Pole to win two Oscars. Not only Hollywood studios but also the secret services were interested in his invention.

At the Academy Awards ceremony on April 3, 1978, two films won: "Star Wars" by George Lucas and "Annie Hall" by Woody Allen. Among the names read on Oscar night there was also a Polish-sounding one: Stefan Kudelski. A smiling 50-year-old in glasses, a suit and a bow tie came on stage. In fact, he looked more like an engineer than a Hollywood star. And indeed he was.Stefan Kudelski, president of the Kudelski company from Chaseaux-sur-Lausanne in Switzerland, was awarded for the Nagra 4.2L reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's hard to imagine modern cinema without this device. Since the early 1960s, Nagra, in combination with a camera, ensured perfect synchronization of sound with the film tape, giving outdoor sound quality unmatched by studio recordings.

Thanks to this, films of the European New Wave by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were created, and then films in Hollywood: from the documentary recording of Bob Dylan's concert tour "Don't Look Back" from 1967 through "The Exorcist" from the 1970s, "Amadeus" from the 1980s and "The English Patient" from the 1990s. Stefan Kudelski received the Oscar statuette twice: for the second time in 1990 (honorary Gordon E. Sawyer Award). The Film Academy honored him with two more scientific and technical awards (in 1965 and 1977) of a slightly lower rank than the Oscar. It was Stefan Kudelski, not Janusz Kamiński, who was the first Pole to receive two Oscar statuettes (Kamiński received the Oscar for cinematography for "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" only in 1994 and 1999).Stefan Kudelski lived in Switzerland since 1940, but his family came from the Borderlands. His father, Tadeusz Kudelski, was one of the Lviv Eaglets defending the city against the Ukrainians in 1918. Adjutant of a professor at the Lviv University of Technology (and at that time also a soldier, Kazimierz Bartel, later a three-time prime minister). In turn, Stefan's grandfather, Jan Tomasz Kudelski, served as the city architect of Stanisławów. This third largest city in Galicia owes to him the reconstruction after the destruction of World War I and many beautiful tenement houses with stained glass in the staircases, including those at Kazimierzowska Street, as well as the Gartenberg Passage - a shopping mall that was the pride of the city. The Kudelski family maintained connections with Stanisławów all the time, but Stefan was born in Warsaw. The boy's godfather was a good friend of his father, Stefan Starzyński, mayor of Warsaw in 1934-39. In September 1939, the Kudelski family evacuated from Warsaw with one of the first government columns. They had no illusions about the fate awaiting people associated with the government from the Germans. In Warsaw they left a beautiful villa in Mokotów and went through Zaleszczyki to Romania, and from there to Hungary and further to France. Tadeusz Kudelski stayed in Paris, and sent his wife and son Stefan across the green border to Switzerland. Stefan passed his high school final exams at the Swiss gymnasium in Florimont, and then started studying at the Polytechnic University of Lausanne. He discontinued it after the fourth year because he came to the conclusion that he would learn nothing more during his studies and decided to pursue his own ideas. He constructed his first tape recorder in a workshop in his kitchen. He patented it and named it Nagra. From the Polish verb "to record". The tape recorder turned out to be a real hit.Stefan Kudelski sold the first copy for 1,000 francs (in the early 1950s it was a considerable amount), which allowed him to continue his business. He founded a company. He named it after himself. It is still active today.

Stefan Kudelski could not return to communist Poland. While living in Switzerland, he married a Polish woman, Lilka Ulbrich. She came from Stanisławów, in 1943 her family escaped from the Ukrainians to the west, and after the war they lived in Poland. Lilka managed to leave here in the late 1950s. She was Stefan's cousin (his mother was née Ulbrich), so it's no wonder that she chose Switzerland as her destination.Great love broke out between Stefan and Lilka. They got married, although due to their close kinship they had to obtain the so-called papal indult. They lived happily for over 50 years and had five children: André, Isabelle, Marguerite, Henri and Irene. The eldest son took over the company from his father in the early 1990s.

In retirement, Stefan Kudelski did what he liked best: flying around Europe in a private plane or sailing on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. He died in 2013 at the age of almost 84. His death was reported by Polish and world media, including the New York Times.

The Miniature Records sat in the White House for years and recorded everything the President of the United States said and was told to him. Special services of many countries, including the American CIA, were also interested in Stefan Kudelski's invention. At the International Spy Museum in Washington, a private institution founded by former CIA employees, you can also see a Nagra tape recorder that was in the possession of the East German Stasi. The equipment produced by Kudelski was taken by mountaineers to Mount Everest, and the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard used it to record sounds in the deepest place on Earth: the Mariana Trench, during his expedition in the Trieste II bathyscaphe in 1960. It was the first descent of a human to the bottom of the Earth.