Moritz Meyerstein

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Moritz Meyerstein

Moritz Meyerstein (born June 16, 1808 in Einbeck , † April 30, 1882 in Göttingen ) was a German mechanic who worked closely with Carl Friedrich Gauß and Wilhelm Weber as a university mechanic at the Georg-August University of Göttingen .

Life

Moritz Meyerstein was born in 1808 as the youngest of seven children of the businessman Jacob Elias Meyerstein (1769–1830). He attended the city school in Einbeck and the grammar school in Holzminden , but was already apprenticed to the mechanic Johann Philipp Rumpf (1791-1833) in Göttingen at the age of 14 . After he had finished this in 1825, he worked for the following two years at the company FW Breithaupt & Sohn in Kassel , which specialized in geodetic instruments, as well as in Hanover and Frankfurt am Main . Then he went to Munich to the renownedMathematical-mechanical institute , where he was busy with the production of meridian circles and theodolites , but also attended courses at the Polytechnic School and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1832 he was sent to Stockholm to help the mechanics there operate a circular dividing machine .

When Rumpf died in 1833, Meyerstein applied to the Göttingen magistrate to be allowed to take over his workshop. Against considerable resistance from the local mechanics and only under the condition that he presented a security deposit of 4,000 Reichstalers - which his father paid him out - his application was granted. Several letters of recommendation were helpful. a. by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius . Meyerstein also took over the position of university instrument inspector from Rumpf , albeit unofficially and without fixed pay until 1841. In the first few years business was difficult. Gauß and Weber only slowly gained confidence in him after some of the work carried out as a trial by Traugott Leberecht Ertel (1778–1858) had been positively assessed. The first work carried out for Gauß and Weber was improved signal transmitters and receivers for electrical telegraphy .

On August 23, 1837, Meyerstein married Betty Warburg (1808–1887), the daughter of a wealthy Hamburg merchant who was a business partner of his father. Sophie Emilie (1838–1894) was born a year later. Meyerstein and his family converted to Christianity on September 10, 1838, probably in order to be granted citizenship five years after he settled in Göttingen.

When Gauß received the order in 1836 to create precise standard measurements for length, weight and volume, it was Meyerstein who produced these using his own length comparator and his own precision scales. In 1841 he was employed as a university instrument and machine inspector with an annual salary of 200 Reichstalers. He was therefore subject to university jurisdiction, was exempt from tax and was not subject to the strict guild rules . He was now allowed to teach students against payment.

Meyerstein never ran his own shop, but worked almost exclusively on order. 5 to 6 assistants and 6 to 8 apprentices were employed in his workshop. Meyerstein's specialty was geodetic and astronomical devices such as leveling instruments , theodolites, meridian circles, equatorials and passage instruments . There were also magnetometers , galvanometers , heliostats , spectrometers , sub-machines and much more. From 1860 he also worked for foreign scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz , Robert Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff .

1863 the now famous Meyer stone was at the request of Gaussian student Moritz Abraham Stern , the honorary doctorate awarded. He received another honor from the Second German North Pole Expedition in 1869/70, which gave the highest mountain on the Shannon Island the name Meyersteinberg (Danish Meyerstein Bjerg), as instruments from his production served the scientists involved well. In 1875, when business began to deteriorate, Meyerstein sold his workshop. However, he never completely withdrew from the business, but continued to manufacture instruments in the basement of his new house.

Works (selection)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. a b c O. Behrendsen: On the history of the development of mechanical art. 1907, p. 136 f.
  2. ^ O. Behrendsen: The mechanical workshops of the city of Göttingen. Its history and its present establishment . Memorandum ed. On the occasion of the World Exhibition of the United Mechanics of Göttingen, Haag, Melle in Hanover 1900, p. 19, which took place in Paris in 1900 .
  3. Østgrønlandske Stednavne - Fra den første kortlægning (PDF; 9.54 MB) on the website of the Danish Arctic Institute (Danish).

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