NatLab

The Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (English translation: Philips Physics Laboratory) or NatLab was the Dutch section of the Philips research department, which did research for the product divisions of that company. Originally located in the Strijp district of Eindhoven, the facility moved to Waalre in the early 1960s. A 1972 municipal rezoning brought the facility back into Eindhoven, which was followed some years later by Eindhoven renaming the street the facility is on into the Prof. Holstlaan, after the first director.

In 1975, the NatLab employed some 2000 people, including 600 researchers with university degrees. Research done at the NatLab has ranged from product-specific to fundamental research into electronics, physics and chemistry, as well as computing science and information technology.

The original NatLab facility was disbanded in 2001 and the facility has been transformed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, which is open to researchers from many different companies. Philips Research is still one of the largest campus tenants, although not with anything like the number of people employed in the NatLab days. Philips Research also has branches in Germany, the United Kingdom, United States, India and China; the non-Netherlands parts of Philips Research account for about half the research work done by Philips nowadays.

The history of the NatLab spans roughly three periods: 1914-1946, 1946–1972 and 1972-2001.

The NatLab was founded in 1914 after a direct decision of Gerard and Anton Philips. At the time Philips was branching out into different areas of electronics and they felt the need to do in-house research to support product development, as well as create a company patent portfolio and reduce the company dependence on patents held by third parties. They hired physicist Gilles Holst (the first director) who assembled a staff consisting of Ekko Oosterhuis and a small number of research assistants; this was the entire scientific staff of the facility for the first decade. Holst held the director's position until 1946 and spent his tenure creating and maintaining an academic atmosphere at the facility in which researchers were given a lot of leeway and access to external research and resources. The external access also included by some of the great physicists of the day (including Albert Einstein in 1923).

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