Daniel Gralath the Elder

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Daniel Gralath
Gralath monument from 1893 in Gdansk

Daniel Gralath (born May 30, 1708 in Danzig ; † July 23, 1767 in Danzig) was a German physicist and mayor of Danzig right city . He was a co-founder of the Natural Research Society in Gdansk .

Gralath had a daughter and five sons, including the legal scholar and local historian Daniel Gralath the Younger (with whom he was often confused in older sources) and Karl Friedrich von Gralath (1741-1818), who also became mayor of Danzig.

Life

Gralath was born as the son of the Danzig merchant Karl Ludwig Gralath (around 1673-1713), whose father , who came from Regensburg , had acquired citizenship in 1690. He attended the Academic Gymnasium Gdansk and was already busy with mathematics and physics during this time. From 1728 he studied law in Halle and Marburg , where he met the polymath and philosopher Christian Wolff . After completing his studies in Leiden , he traveled to France with his brother. In 1734 he returned to Danzig and devoted himself to science as a private citizen. In 1737 he married Dorothea Juliana Klein (1718–1788). With his father-in-law Jacob Theodor Klein and seven other scholars, he founded the Natural Research Society in 1743 and became its director in 1755. Gralath held many offices in the city administration: he was quartermaster , alderman and councilor before he became mayor of Danzig in 1763. At the suggestion and with financial support of Gralath, the Große Allee between Danzig and the suburb of Langfuhr was laid out in 1767–1769 and planted with Dutch linden trees. Today the street under the name Aleja Zwycięstwa ( German  Siegesallee ) is part of the main traffic axis of Gdańsk.

Gralath worked with Gottfried Lengnich and other Danzig councilors on the constitutional history of Danzig.

As a physicist, Gralath's interests were widespread. Most successfully he worked on electricity . In March 1746 he repeated Ewald Georg von Kleist's experiment , which had made him discover the principle of the Leiden bottle in 1745 , which was initially also called Kleist's bottle . Gralath's bottle, in which he had stuck an iron wire, was filled with water. Their electricity was enough to deal a blow to a human chain of 20 people. He published about the new instrument in 1747 in the experiments and treatises of the Natural Research Society . Gralath was the first to combine several of these bottles into a battery in order to increase their effectiveness. He was also the first to try to measure the force between electrically charged bodies.

Daniel Gralath had been an honorary member of the Royal German Society of Göttingen founded by Johann Matthias Gesner since 1752 .

Fonts (selection)

  • Exercitatio physica. De origine fontium . Typis Thomae Johannis Schreiber, Danzig 1727
  • History of Electricity , 3 volumes, Danzig 1747–1756
  • Electrical library . In: Treatises of the Natural Research Society of Danzig 1747, pp. 525–558

literature

Web links

Commons : Daniel Gralath  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see ADB entries for the two
  2. ^ Eduard Schumann: History of the Natural Research Society in Danzig 1743-1892, Leipzig 1893. (Festschrift to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Natural Research Society in Danzig on January 2, 1893) [1]
  3. ^ Otto Günther: Catalog of the Danzig City Library , Danzig 1903
personal data
SURNAME Gralath, Daniel the Elder
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and mayor of Gdansk
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1708
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1767
Place of death Danzig