DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
WILLEM ADRIAAN DE KOCK
“Wim”
23 May 1935 – 9 March 2021
Philips NatLab engineer, Indo-Dutch camp survivor and lifelong PSV season-ticket holder
At ten, in the weeks after the liberation of a Japanese internment camp near Bandung, Wim de Kock built a radio from a razor blade, a pencil lead and a coil of copper wire, and the barracks listened to the outside world for the first time in three years. He used to say his career began there and everything after was just better equipment.
He was born in Bandung in 1935, the son of a plantation chemist, and spent the war years behind wire with his mother and sister. The violent months that followed liberation were no easier, and in 1950 the family sailed to the Netherlands on a ship full of people who had never seen snow. They reached Rotterdam in February in borrowed coats. 'The cold,' Wim said, 'was the first honest thing anyone had told us.' He worked hard, won a place at TU Delft in 1954 and graduated as an electrical engineer in 1960.
He joined the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven the same year and stayed thirty-eight years. His most important work, he said, was never in the newspapers: he was one of the forty engineers who taught the laser pickup of the compact disc to follow a track narrower than a human hair. Nobody remembers their names, and every CD in the world carries their work. In retirement he liked to point out that this was exactly how engineering should be.
He married Truus Smits in 1962 and they raised Annelies and Rob in a house in Eindhoven where Sunday meant rijsttafel, with sambal made to a recipe from a grandmother in Bandung, and where the garden shed was always full of half-built things. He held a PSV season ticket for sixty years, regarding the club, which Philips had founded, as a works outing, and he cycled everywhere until he was eighty-four.
In 2012 he took Annelies back to Bandung to find the house he had left as a boy. He found it, and a woman at the gate invited them in for tea and showed him a crack in the wall that he remembered making. Wim died peacefully at home on 9 March 2021. He leaves Truus, Annelies, Rob and five grandchildren.
“The cold was the first honest thing anyone had told us.”