Abstract
This will be an entirely personal report about the development of a branch of experimental physics more than 50 years ago at the “Physikalisches Institut” of the “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule”, (ETH) in Zurich. At that time Paul Scherrer—best known for his contribution to the development of the Debye-Scherrer-Hull X-ray method—was the director of the laboratory and due to his predecessor Peter Debye, who left Zürich in 1927, there still was a tradition of studying the dielectric properties of gases and liquids.