Immanuel Friedlaender

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Immanuel Friedlaender (around 1930)

Gottfried Immanuel Friedlaender (born February 9, 1871 in Berlin ; † January 3, 1948 in Zurich ) was a German-Swiss volcanologist .

Private life

Friedlaender was the son of Carl Friedlaender (* 1817; † 1876), professor of economics in Berlin; his grandfather was the Berlin doctor Nathan Friedlaender (1776-1830). One of his siblings was the zoologist Benedict Friedlaender , with whom he traveled to Hawaii and Southeast Asia as a young man . He later married Hertha Meyer (* 1876, † 1958), one of the younger sisters of the physicist Stefan Meyer and the chemist Hans Leopold Meyer . The couple had four children with Clara Anna Hertha, Olga Beatrice Hertha, Carl Gotthelf Immanuel and Irmgard Elizabeth Hertha. In 1922 Friedländer took on Swiss citizenship.

Career

Photo taken by Friedlaender: Matavanu crater , Samoa (1907)

He received his PhD in physics, but soon his interest turned to volcanology through the influence of his brother.

At the International Geological Congress in Stockholm in 1910 , he suggested the establishment of an international volcanic institute in Naples and received numerous positive reactions. This prompted him to publish a corresponding appeal in 1911. Attached to the call was a list of signatures, which was signed by numerous scientists. With the Zeitschrift für Vulkanologie in 1914 he created the first journal specializing in volcanology - it was to serve as the mouthpiece of the institute in the future. However, one of the first messages announced via this medium was in a negative form: Since the financial contributions actually promised to build and operate the institute were much lower than hoped, Friedlaender announced in an article in 1914 that the public project would be abandoned. Instead, he realized it in a private setting. Construction work was completed in 1914 and laboratories were equipped. The main task of the institute was a permanent and systematic study of volcanic activities in the Gulf of Naples, as well as the registration and recording of earthquakes in the region of Vesuvius . For this reason, a seismological station was put into operation. Other facilities at the Immanuel Friedlaender volcanic institute, which is mostly privately run, were a library and an extensive volcanic rock collection. The institute had to be closed in 1934 due to the political situation in Italy . The measuring instruments were handed over to the Neapolitan volcano observatory of the Seminario Arcivescovile and the library, the photo, graphic and mineral collections were donated to the ETH Zurich in 1935 . In 1936 Friedlaender finally also discontinued the magazine for volcanology .

Together with Karl Erich Andrée , Gustav Angenheister , Beno Gutenberg , Franz Kossmat , Gerhard Krumbach , Karl Mack , Ludger Mintrop , Peter Polis , August Heinrich Sieberg and Emil Wiechert , Friedlaender also called the German Seismological Society in Leipzig on September 19, 1922 Life. It was the forerunner of today's German Geophysical Society . Today the Vulkaninstitut Immanuel Friedlaender Foundation is based at the ETH Zurich. His extensive photo collection with over 8900 photos of volcanic formations is still considered the most important legacy of the geologist. It is stored in the scientific history collections of the ETH Library in Zurich .

The book with his brother Benedict Absolute or Relative Movement deals with Mach's principle in the context of classical physics and, by treating the effect of rotating masses in an extension of Newton's theory of gravity, is a forerunner of the treatment of the Lense-Thirring effect of general relativity. In 1904 August Föppl carried out a test in which the effect of the rotating earth on a rapidly rotating gyroscope was examined (with no detectable effect within the accuracy).

Works

  • Absolute or relative movement? , with Benedict Friedlaender. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1896.
  • Maps of the Vesuvius eruption cone and the Vesuvius crater , Napoli: Detken & Rocholl, 1913.
  • Contributions to the knowledge of the Cape Verde Islands , Berlin: D. Reimer, 1913.
  • The history of Vesuvius , Berlin: D. Reimer, 1929.
  • Physics of the Earth I: Volcanology , Arthur L. Day, Immanuel Friedlaender, TA Jagger, Karl Sapper, February 1931, National Research Council Bulletin No. 77, 77 pp.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foundation in Friedlaender's name
  2. ↑ doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-001602395
  3. ^ Herbert Pfister, On the history of the so-called Lense-Thirring effect, General Relativity and Gravitation, Volume 39, 2007, pp. 1735-1748
personal data
SURNAME Friedlaender, Immanuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Friedlaender, Gottfried Immanuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German volcanologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 1948
Place of death Zurich