Arthur von Oettingen

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Arthur von Oettingen

Arthur Joachim von Oettingen (* March 16 July / March 28,  1836 greg. On the Ludenhof estate near Dorpat , Livonia , today Estonia ; † September 5, 1920 in Bensheim , Bergstrasse district , Hesse ) was a German-Baltic physicist and Music theorist , professor at the Universities of Dorpat and Leipzig , Imperial Russian Real State Councilor.

family

He came from the old noble family von Oettingen , originally from Westphalia , and was the son of the landowner Alexander von Oettingen (1798–1846), Livonian land marshal and district administrator, and Helene von Knorring (1793–1863).

  • Arthur von Oettingen

  • Natalie von Brackel

Oettingen married on April 24, 1869 in Dorpat Natalie von Brackel (born August 17, 1850 in Warta , district of Sieradz , Poland ; † February 12, 1913 in Leipzig , Saxony ), the daughter of the Imperial Russian Major General Woldemar von Brackel and Katharina Elisabeth Duffing .

His two brothers, Georg (1824–1916) and Alexander von Oettingen (1827–1905), also worked at the University of Dorpat. Three other brothers, August Georg Friedrich (1823–1908), Nicolai Conrad Peter (1826–1876) and Eduard Reinhold (1829–1919), were active in national politics in Livonia.

Life

Oettingen studied astronomy in Dorpat (1853 to 1855) , then physics. In 1859 he became a candidate in physics with his work On a Class of Definite Integrals . Since experimental physics was not represented in Dorpat, he continued his studies in Paris from 1859 and in Berlin from 1860 . In Paris, he not only studied physics in the laboratories of Antoine César Becquerel and Henri Victor Regnault , but also attended courses in mathematics, anatomy and physiology. In Berlin he worked in the laboratories of Heinrich Gustav Magnus , Johann Christian Poggendorff , Heinrich Wilhelm Dove and Karl Adolph Paalzow . In addition, he again attended mathematics lectures, including those of Jakob Steiner , whose synthetic geometry he himself later represented scientifically.

After his return to Dorpat he received his doctorate in 1862 with the thesis The residue of the Leiden battery as a test tool for the type of discharge to the Magisterium and acquired the teaching qualification as a private lecturer with about charging the Leyden battery by induction and about discharging the battery by the inductorium . In 1865 he received his doctorate with the work on the correction of thermometers, in particular on Bessel's calibrating method, and in the same year he became associate professor and in March 1868 full professor in his hometown. Oettingen devoted himself in particular to meteorology and founded an observatory in Dorpat, which was assigned to the university in 1869.

Since the 1980s there have been increasing political disputes in the Baltic Sea Governments , which have also spread to higher education. In 1888 Oettingen retired, but initially continued to work as an honorary professor for five years . In 1893 Oettingen therefore settled in Leipzig , where he worked as a private lecturer on the recommendation of his student Wilhelm Ostwald and was appointed honorary professor in 1894. He held this office until 1919. Since 1901 he was a member of the Royal Saxon Society of Sciences .

Orthotonophonium from 1914 in the Museum for Musical Instruments at the University of Leipzig

Oettingen was also scientifically active in thermodynamics and was the first European physicist who paved the way for Josiah Willard Gibbs' ideas . He invented the anemometer to measure wind speeds. In addition, he dealt with the fundamentals of music theory and is a passionate advocate of harmonic dualism , the interpretation of the minor chord as a sub -sound that is symmetrical to the major chord . Following Hermann von Helmholtz and many other physicists and musicians he constructed with his 1916 completed Orthotonophonium a harmonium in just intonation, whose Tondisposition accordance with its dualistic conceptions of tone d was designed based symmetrical. On this instrument, the octave is divided into 53 non-tempered pitches, so that thirds and fifths of all tones can be intonated, but no natural sevenths . In his book The dual harmony system , he introduced the millioctave as a unit of measurement for microintervals in 1913 . To do this, he divided the octave into 1000 mO. However, this measure did not prevail against the division into 1200 cents (100 cents per tempered semitone). Due to the reception of music theorists such as Hugo Riemann , Richard Wicke and Jens Rohwer , some of his thoughts were discussed intensively for a long time; Martin Vogel is one of the few later theorists who took up his ideas .

In 1909 he founded the Leipzig Artists' Union of Leonids together with Edwin Bormann and Georg Bötticher .

Arthur and Natalie von Oettingen are buried in the south cemetery in Leipzig

Oettingen died on September 5, 1920 in Bensheim an der Bergstrasse, where he had moved to his son Reinhart in 1919. He was buried in the south cemetery in Leipzig.

Orders and decorations

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Lothar Dunsch: "Arthur von Oettingen - the academic teacher as successor", in: A foundation for the building of the sciences. 100 Years of Ostwald's Classics (1889–1989) (= Ostwald's Classics of Exact Sciences Special Edition), Leipzig 1989, pp. 40–45.
  • Karl Traugott Goldbach: "Arthur von Oettingen and his orthotonophonium in context". In: Tartu ülikooli muusikadirektor 200 , ed. v. Geiu Rohtla, Tartu 2007.
  • Karl Traugott Goldbach: "The music theory teaching of the natural scientists Arthur von Oettingen and Wilhelm Ostwald at the University of Dorpat", in: University and Music in the Baltic Sea Region , ed. v. Ekkehard Ochs u. a. (= Greifswalder Contributions to Musicology Vol. 17), Berlin 2009, pp. 217–240. partly online
  • Karl Traugott Goldbach: "At the borders of music theory", in: At the borders of science. The annals of natural philosophy and the natural and cultural philosophical program of their editors Wilhelm Ostwald and Rudolf Goldscheid , ed. v. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer u. a. (= Treatises of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, Philogisch-Historische Klasse, Vol. 82, No. 1), Stuttgart 2011, pp. 187–211.
  • Toomas Pung: “The v. Oettingen ”, in: Germans in the Tsarist Empire and Russians in Germany , ed. v. Ingrid Kästner and Regine Pfrepper (= German-Russian relations in medicine and natural sciences, Vol. 12), Aachen 2005, pp. 359–380 (on Arthur von Oettingen here pp. 369–376).
  • Martin Vogel: “Arthur v. Oettingen and the harmonious dualism ”. In: Contributions to the music theory of the 19th century , ed. v. Martin Vogel (= Studies on the History of Music in the 19th Century, Vol. 4), Regensburg 1966, pp. 103–132.
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility , noble houses B volume XII, page 374, volume 64 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1977, ISSN  0435-2408
  • Bartel, Hans-Georg:  Oettingen, Arthur von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 477 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Oettingen, Arthur von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oettingen, Arthur Joachim von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic physicist and music theorist
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Dorpat , Estonia
DATE OF DEATH 5th September 1920
Place of death Bensheim , Bergstrasse district , Hesse