Jakob Kaspar Tschopp

Jakob Kaspar Tschopp ( Athanasius ) (* 1803 in Knutwyl in the canton of Lucerne; † 1882 in Einsiedeln ) was a Swiss clergyman and inventor.

He entered the collegiate school in Einsiedeln in 1817 and took the religious vows in 1820, receiving the name Athanasius. From 1826 he held all possible positions as teacher, novice master, confessor. He spent several years as the prior of the Indiana state monastery in America.

In addition to his spiritual subjects, he devoted himself to physics, whose chair he held from 1829 to 1838 and then again from 1849 to 1851. He invented an improved valve horn wind instrument , the Konotomograph for drawing conic sections and creating parabolic concave mirrors and, at the end of the 1840s, the electromagnetic copy telegraph apparatus Typotelegraph , which the mechanic Meinrad Theiler (father of Richard Theiler ) had made. When the telegraph system was to be introduced in Switzerland in the 1850s under the direction of Carl August von Steinheil , Tschopp was encouraged to present his machine in Bern. Steinheil and Matthäus Hippfound, however, that the apparatus was too difficult to use in practice. Theiler, who had hoped for a job here, then moved to London, where Frederick Collier Bakewell developed a similar apparatus.

literature

• Father Columban Brugger: Memories of P. Athanasius Tschopp ; In: Annual report on the teaching and education institute of the Benedictine monastery Maria Einsiedeln in the academic year 1882/1883
• Cornelia Thürlemann: Father Athanasius Tschopp invented the fax machine 150 years ago: a misunderstood inventive spirit ; In: EA. - July 25, 2000, No. 58

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/OCA/Books2008-10/vierteljahrsschr/vierteljahrsschr3637natu/vierteljahrsschr3637natu_djvu.txt