He attended the Leibniz University Hannover (then Technische Hochschule), and after receiving his electrical engineering degrees (Dipl.
), both in 1906, he worked for Professor Ludwig Prandtl as a teaching assistant at the Institute for Applied Physics and Mechanics at Göttingen University.
After leaving Göttingen in 1908 he started at the manufacturer of electrical machinery Siemens-Schuckertwerke (SSW), part of the Siemens group of companies, in Berlin.
In 1923 he was appointed Director of the Scientific Department (Wissenschaftliche Abteilung) of SSW responsible for the research on and development of machinery and systems for the firm.
Among his contributions were: In 1930, just after returning home from a summer vacation on the Dutch seaside, his 2 3⁄4-year-old son became ill with leg paralysis.
From that time Rudenberg was determined to find or invent a way to make such a small virus particle visible.
He thought that electrons, because of their subatomic size, as he had learned in Göttingen from Wiechert, would be able to resolve such small virus particles, and he investigated ways to focus these to create their enlarged image.