Wilhelm Eduard Weber

Wilhelm Edward Weber was born on October 14, 1804, and was the fifth child in the family of a professor of theology. He studied natural sciences in Halle, where he became a privat-docent, and then in 1828 - a freelance professor of physics. In the same year, together with his brother Ernst Heinrich, who held the post of professor of physiology in Leipzig, he wrote a scientific paper on acoustics, which brought him wide popularity among physicists.

In 1831 he was invited to take the place of a full-time professor at the University of GцTttingen. This was the beginning of a close friendship and scientific cooperation in the study of magnetism with Gauss. The result of this collaboration was the invention of an electromagnetic telegraph, which they experienced together in 1833.

By the same time, the event, which had a great influence on its future fate, belongs. In 1873, together with six colleagues, he was dismissed from the university. Weber was among the celebrated "Göttingen Seven", which in writing expressed its disagreement with the unauthorized abrogation of the constitution by the Hanoverian King Edward Augustus. But even during the five-year unemployment, when he lived in very limited material conditions only thanks to Gauss's financial assistance and the collection of donations, he did not stop his scientific research in the field of magnetism. This is eloquently spoken by a six-volume book published jointly with Gauss, which contains the results Their observations from 1836 to 1841.

In 1843 he took the place of professor at the University of Leipzig. Here his electrodynamometer appeared, the principle of which was based on the interaction of two currents discovered by Ampere and by means of which this interaction could be precisely determined and used. Six years later, Weber was again invited to Goettingen, where he spent the rest of his life.

Here he started research, which led to the determination of the absolute unit of electrical voltage, or electromotive force, and using Weber's law of induction and based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field produced by Gauss, he used the values ​​he obtained. His terrestrial inductor, with which he conducted extensive quantitative measurements, later became one of the most important devices intended for electromagnetic measurements.

The greatest merit of Weber was that he became the founder of the generally accepted electric system of measures, and he achieved this by an extremely thorough and accurate quantitative re-examination of all discoveries, from Oersted to Faraday, and for this he used Gauss's experience in determining magnetic magnitudes.

For his research, he invented many new, more accurate, more sensitive instruments and devices and tirelessly produced a huge number of such accurate measurements, which no one had before him. In this case, they made another discovery, consisting in the fact that with the combination of both Coulomb laws for magnetic and electric forces, a certain definite speed assumed a great importance. Using complex measurements, he determined that this speed is equal to the speed of light. Thus, for the first time in the science of electromagnetism, the speed of light appeared as a definite physical quantity. Weber was also one of the first to generalize the idea of ​​elementary electric quanta, and for the first time attributed to these very small particles, in addition to a certain charge, a certain mass (inertia). He was very modest, childishly direct, but his way of thinking was uncompromisingly straightforward, honest and absolutely accurate. Weber was not married, and his niece was in charge of his niece. He died on June 23, 1891 in Göttingen.