Paul Erman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Erman (1764-1851)

Paul Erman (born February 29, 1764 in Berlin , †  October 11, 1851 in Berlin) was a German physicist .

Erman family

The Erman family came from Mulhouse in Alsace and was originally called Ermendinger. Paul's great-grandfather changed the name to Erman when he moved to Geneva. Paul's father was the historian and Protestant theologian Jean Pierre Erman (1735-1814). Paul Erman married Caroline Hitzig (1784–1848), a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig , sister of Julius Eduard Hitzig and sister-in-law of Nathan Mendelssohn . Her son Georg Adolf Erman (1806–1877) worked as a physicist in Berlin. Her grandchildren were the librarian Wilhelm Erman (1850–1932), the Egyptologist Adolf Erman (1854–1937) and the lawyer Heinrich Erman (1857–1940). The lawyer Walter Erman , founder of the Erman Commentary on the Civil Code, was her great-grandson.

Life

Paul Erman was born on February 29, 1764 in Berlin as the son of Jean Pierre Erman , the preacher of the Huguenot community, director of the French grammar school (Collége français) and long-time member of the academy's philosophical class, and his wife Louise Lecoq (1738– 1791), daughter of tobacconist Paul Lecoq (1703–1769) and Anne Jordan (1711–1739), a sister of Charles Étienne Jordan . Like his mother tongue, his education was predominantly French and, in accordance with the views of the circles to which his family belonged, received an ethical-philosophical direction.

Determined to be a preacher and already advanced to the threshold of this profession, however, he refrained from the examination. Erman was interested in the natural sciences and at the age of 18 took on a teaching post for natural history at the French grammar school in Berlin, to which he himself owed his classical education (he never attended a university) and where his father had previously taught. In 1791 he was appointed professor of physics at the general war school.

When the Berlin University was founded in 1809, he was given a full professorship for physics at this university, which he held until his death. In 1806 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and between 1810 and 1841 was secretary of the academy's mathematical and natural science class. In 1819 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Act

Erman worked in particular on problems of electricity , magnetism , hygrology , optics and physiology , where he made important contributions. Up until the age of almost 40 he had not published any research of his own, and in some cases he had only published unfinished work in the Academy's memoranda and in Ludwig Gilbert's Annalen der Physik and Poggendorff's Annalen der Physik und Chemie in numerous treatises. Among other things, he dealt with the effects of the Voltasche column developed at that time .

He was the first to observe electroscopic voltage phenomena on a damp conductor closing the column, and to demonstrate the ability of the earth and water to conduct the galvanic current . His discovery of the unipolar lead of the flames and the soap was in 1806 by the mathematical-physical class of the French National Institute of of Napoleon Bonaparte exposed Galvanic Price awarded by 3000 francs. Erman is one of the first researchers in the field of electrochemical movement phenomena. Also the optics , the thermodynamics and the physics of the earth owe him some important contributions. Erman was an opponent of natural philosophy and a representative of sober and empirical research.

literature

Web links

Commons : Paul Erman  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Grete Ronge:  Erman, Paul. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 599 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ^ Member entry of Paul Erman at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on May 23, 2016.
  3. Eugen Lommel:  Erman, Paul . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, p. 229 f.