Hans Ferdinand Mayer

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Hans Ferdinand Mayer (born October 23, 1895 in Pforzheim ; † October 18, 1980 in Munich ) was a German physicist and electrical engineer .

Life

Mayer came from a modest background. After elementary school he attended the Friedrichsschule in Pforzheim. In 1914 he volunteered as a war volunteer. He was seriously wounded on his 19th birthday and was assigned to a replacement battalion after recovering. In February 1915 he received his secondary school diploma . Starting in the summer semester of 1915, Mayer studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at universities in Karlsruhe and Heidelberg . In 1920 he received his doctorate with the thesis "On the behavior of molecules towards free slow electrons". His doctoral supervisor was the Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard . In 1922 he joined Siemens & Halske AG in Berlin . In 1926 he began working with Karl Küpfmüller (1898–1977). Both scientists were concerned with the possibility of interference-free information transmission in cable connections over long distances. On April 20, 1936, Mayer took over the management of the central laboratory at Siemens & Halske AG in Berlin. In 1938 he was appointed director. From 1938 he made numerous trips abroad. In 1943 Mayer was sentenced to concentration camp imprisonment for political reasons (listening to " enemy broadcasters " and criticizing the Nazi regime). With the intervention of Hermann von Siemens and Friedrich Lüschen with Albert Speer , Heinrich Himmler and various party offices, a trial at the People's Court could be prevented. Mayer stayed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and from September 1943 in Dachau concentration camp until the end of the war. In the Dachau concentration camp he became the scientific director of a newly established research institute for high frequency technology. Prisoners from twelve nations worked in his institute, including a. the former rector of the Technical University of Warsaw Kazimierz Drewnowski (1881–1952). In June 1944 he was transferred to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp and then to the Mauthausen concentration camp in mid-February 1945 . Since the technical equipment had been brought to Sachsenhausen, Mayer managed to move it there again.

In 1946 Mayer moved to the USA for four years. There he did research for the US Air Force in Dayton (Ohio) and taught at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York State) as a professor of communications engineering. In 1950 he returned to Germany. In Munich he was in charge of the research department for communications engineering at Siemens & Halske AG until 1962.

Mayer was married to Betty Charlotte Stutius since 1926. Several children arose from the marriage.

plant

Mayer was the author of the Oslo Report , a seven-page report on military research in the "Third Reich", which arose in the summer of 1939 on a business trip to Norway and was leaked to the British consulate in Oslo and which he shared with " a German scientist who I am well-disposed towards you ", It was not until 1977 that he confided to his own family that he had written the Oslo Report. At his request, this was only made public after the death of Mayer and his wife.

In November 1926, Mayer published an article (HF Mayer. "About the replacement scheme of the amplifier tube". Telegraphen- und Fernsprech-Technik, 15: 335–337, 1926.) which (independent of older previous work by Hermann von Helmholtz and Léon Charles Thévenin ) describes the introduction of replacement voltage sources after replacement power sources. Mayer was the first to publish that the equivalent voltage of the equivalent voltage source is equal to the open-circuit voltage and the equivalent current of the equivalent power source is equal to the short-circuit current. Edward Lawry Norton also described this in 1926 in an internal report by Bell Labs . The theorem is known under the name Norton or Mayer-Norton theorem .

Hans Ferdinand Mayer published another 25 technical articles and held more than 80 patents.

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Journal for the Post and Telecommunications, Issue No. 22/1961 p. 849

literature

personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Hans Ferdinand
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Pforzheim
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1980
Place of death Munich