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Wilhelm Eduard Weber was German physicist who studied magnetism and electricity. Working with mathematician Karl Gauss, he made sensitive magnetometers to measure magnetic fields, and instruments to measure direct and alternating currents. He also built an electric telegraph. The SI unit of magnetic flux, the weber, is named after him. Weber defined an electromagnetic unit for electric current which was applied to measurements of current made by the deflection of the magnetic needle of a galvanometer. In 1846, he developed the electrodynamometer, in which a current causes a coil suspended within another coil to turn when a current is passed through both. In 1852, Weber defined the absolute unit of electrical resistance. |
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Wilhelm Eduard Weber was born on October 24, 1804, in
Wittenberg, Germany (about 60 miles southwest of Berlin), in a family of
12 children. Weber was the son of Michael Weber who was a professor of
divinity. The family Weber lived in the Languth House on the
Schlossstrasse. Today the house is better known as "the house with the
golden globe". Languth House as it appears today |
Young Wilhelm Weber |
William was the second of three brothers. Two of his brothers, Ernst Heinrich Weber and Eduard Friedrich Weber, became noted scientists worked in anatomy and physiology. In 1815, after the Universities Halle and Wittenberg were merged, Wilhelm's father Michael moved his family to Halle. William had received his first lessons from his father, but was now sent to the Orphan Asylum and Grammar School at Halle. Then Wilhelm attended the Francke Institute and the University. Wilhelm Weber entered the University of Halle in 1822 where he studied physics and wrote his doctoral dissertation (Ph.D.) in 1826 on the acoustic theory of reed organ pipes. He remained teaching at Halle until 1831 when he was made professor of physics at Göttingen on the recommendation of the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. |
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At Göttingen, Weber built a 3-km telegraph to connect the
physics laboratory with the astronomical observatory where Gauss worked,
and this was the first practical telegraph to operate anywhere in the
world. Wilhelm Eduard Weber together with his friend Gauss investigated
terrestrial magnetism. Gauss and Weber organized a network of observation
stations in 1836-41 to correlate measurements of terrestrial magnetism
made around the world. The marble board (inscription: "First electrical telegraph") is fixed at the front wall of the observatory |
Weber's telegraph |
The Gauss-Weber telegraph, 1833 |
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During the time that Weber worked with Gauss on measuring magnetic strength he developed sensitive magnetometers and other magnetic instruments. This picture shows a portable magnetometer built by Wilhelm Weber in 1839. |
Wilhelm Weber was Gauss’s assistant and leading experimental collaborator when he started working on the experimental validation of the Ampčre force. He accomplished this research over the period 1832-1846. Weber’s discovery made a revolution in physics, the full implications of which are still unrealized. Worse, today, the underlying discovery itself is almost buried.
Ampčre's
experimental conclusions drew on a series of brilliant geometrical deductions,
derived from the observation of configurations of current-carrying wires in
which the forces, presumably, cancelled each other, producing no observable
motion. To validate the Ampčre Law, one needed to be absolutely sure that the
lack of motion was not due to friction in the joints of the apparatus, or
related effects. Gauss and his young assistant, Wilhelm Weber, devised a new
apparatus, the electrodynamometer, which could directly measure, to within
fractions of a second of arc, the angular displacement produced in a multiply
wound electric coil by another electrical coil perpendicular to it. By reducing
the effects of each of the two coils to that of circular current loops, Ampčre's
simple law for the force exerted by a current loop could be applied. Placing the
coils in different positions, and at different distances from each other,
allowed for determinations of the electrodynamic force, geometrically equivalent
to those which Ampčre had deduced form his null experiments.
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Weber improved the tangent galvanometer invented by Hermann von Helmholtz and built an electrodynamometer suitable for studying the force produced by one electric current on another: when the same current passes through two concentric coils placed at right angles to each other, the resulting torque depends on the square of the current. The picture shows the electrodynamometer constructed in 1841 by Wilhelm Weber and used in the final determination of the validity of Ampere's electrodynamics. It consists of two perpendicular electrical coils. The outer coil is suspended in such a way that its rotation, under the influence of the inner coil, can be precisely determined by observing the deflection of the mirror image of a meter stick in a telescope, as in the Gauss-designed magnetometer. The inner coil can be removed, and placed at various distances. |
Weber's Electrodynamometer #10135 Siemens Bros., London |
Weber's Electrodynamometer #10405 Unsigned |
This electrodynamometer was designed by Wilhelm Weber in 1845.
In this electrodynamometer the magnetic field is provided by a current carrying
coil instead of a permanent magnet. The instrument is operated in the null mode,
i.e., the fiber suspending the rotating coil is turned so as to bring the coil
back to its rest position, the current then being read from the angle of
rotation of the fiber. This was a secondary standard for current measurement
until the 1920s when it was replaced by the more convenient direct reading meter
patented by Edward Weston.
(Reference: John T. Stock and Denys Vaughn, The Development of Instruments to
Measure Current, Science Museum, 1983, p.39-40.)
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When Victoria became Queen of Britain in 1837 her uncle became ruler of Hanover and revoked the liberal constitution. Weber was one of 7 professors at Göttingen to sign a protest and all were dismissed. The results of a rigorous program of instrument building and experimentation was interrupted by Weber's expulsion from Göttingen University as a result of the political events of 1837. He remained at Göttingen without a position until 1843 when he became professor of physics at Leipzig. His the most important scientific results were finally published at Leipzig in 1846 in his book "Elektrodynamische Massenbestimmungen" (Electrodynamical Measurements, 1846). These results completely confirmed the deductions of Ampčre, and also introduced a new physical principle. Wilhelm Eduard Weber, lithograph printed by Rudolf Hoffmann, ca. 1840, from the original artist Goettingen Petri |
The discovery of the phenomena of electrical and magnetic induction had introduced a new element into the considerations of electrical law, not taken up in Ampčre's 1826 work. There thus existed, side by side, three seemingly valid descriptions of the electrical interaction: (1) the Coulomb-Poisson law, describing the interaction of two electrical masses at rest; (2) the Ampčre law, describing the interaction of elements of moving electricity, and: (3) a description of the laws of induction, elaborated by Emil Lenz and Franz Neumann. In his Fundamental Electrical Law, stated in 1846, Weber achieved the unification of these various phenomena under a single conception.
Instead of the mathematical entities, described as current
elements by Ampčre, Weber hypothesized the existence within the conductor of
positive and negative electrical particles. He assumed that the presence of an
electrical tension caused these particles to move at equal velocities in
opposite directions. If one regards an Ampčre current element as containing, at
any given instant, a positive and a negative electrical particle, passing each
other, then in the pairwise relationship of two current elements, there are four
interactions to be considered. By the Coulomb law, these interactions,
consisting of two repulsions and two attractions, cancel each other. However,
the elementary experiments of Ampčre had shown that a motion is produced between
the wires, implying the existence of a force not described by the Coulomb law.
For example, two parallel conducting wires attract each other when the current
in the two wires flows in the same direction, and repel each other when the
opposite is the case. The situation is perfectly well explained under the Ampčre
force law, when one takes into account the angular relationship of the
respective current elements. However, Weber's unifying approach was to assume
that the relative velocities of the electrical particles produced a modification
in the Coulomb electrostatic force, to produce the resultant force between the
wires. Considering all the configurations which Ampčre had examined, as well as
those arising from the phenomena of induction, he was able to formulate a
general statement of the Fundamental Electrical Law. This showed that the
general law describing the force of interaction of two electrical particles,
depends upon the relative velocities and the relative accelerations of the
particles. The Coulomb electrostatic law thus becomes a special case of Weber's
general law, when the particles are at relative rest.
In the Weber Electrical Law, there is a relative
velocity, corresponding to the constant c in his formula, at which the
force between a pair of electrical particles becomes zero. The Weber-Kohlrausch
experiment, carried out at Göttingen in 1854, was designed to determine
this value. It was found to be experimentally equal, in electrodynamic
units, to the product of the velocity of light, in vacuo, with the square
root of 2. That value, became known as the Weber constant. In
electromagnetic units, it was equal to the light velocity. Bernhard
Riemann, who participated in the experiment, soon wrote up the obvious
conclusion of a deep connection between light and electrodynamic, or
electromagnetic phenomena. Unfortunately, Weber failed to take any notice
of this fact. However, this unexpected link between electricity and optics
became central to James Clerk Maxwell's great development of
electromagnetic field theory. Wilhelm Eduard Weber |
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Another Weber's important result was the development of a
system of units that expressed electrical concepts in terms of mass,
length, and time. Gauss had previously done this for magnetism. Since
force was expressed in these dimensions, he was then able to find his law
of electric force. The principle was not very satisfactory because it did
not conserve energy, but with it Weber publicized the view that matter was
made up of charged particles held together by the force. Weber modified
the central force concepts which pervaded physics in his book
"Elektrodynamische Massenbestimmungen" (Electrodynamical
Measurements, 1846) by presenting a force law which was dependent on
velocity and acceleration. Weber also linked the force between atoms
to the their potential energy. His work inspired the direction that
physics took in the latter half of the century. The units of Gauss and
Weber were adopted at an international conference in Paris in 1881. The
unit of magnetic flux (the weber) is named in his honor. Wilhelm Weber and Karl Friedrich Gauss; painter: Karl-Conrad-Friedrich Bauer |
The SI unit of magnetic flux, weber (Wb), honors the German physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber, one of the early researchers of magnetism. "Flux" is the rate (per unit of time) in which something crosses a surface perpendicular to the flow. If the something is a magnetic field, then the magnetic flux across a perpendicular surface is the product of the magnetic flux density, in teslas, and the surface area, in square meters. If a varying magnetic field passes perpendicularly through a circular loop of conducting material, the variation in the field induces a electric potential in the loop. If the flux is changing at a uniform rate of one weber per second, the induced potential is one volt. This means that numerically the flux in webers is equal to the potential, in volts, that would be created by collapsing the field uniformly to zero in one second. One weber is the flux induced in this way by a current varying at the uniform rate of one ampere per second. The weber is a large unit, equal to 108 maxwells, and practical fluxes are usually fractions of one weber. (Because of this, when we want to induce an electric potential in a conductor with a changing field, as we do in all electric generators, transformers and electric motors, we loop the conductor into hundreds of coils, thus adding together the small voltages induced in each loop by the changing field.) |
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Wilhelm Weber's brothers. |
When Wilhelm Weber came to work at the Leipzig
University, he often collaborated with his brothers Ernst and Eduard,
renowned physiologists, that were already on the faculty. Actually, his
collaboration with the brothers was started much earlier. Young Wilhelm
Weber, just 18 years old at the time, assisted his brother Ernst in
pioneering investigations on wave motion. Their sophisticated
research resulted in the publication in 1825 of "Wellenlehre, auf
Experimenten gegründet", a 575-page monograph on wave theory that
included 18 copper plate illustrations. This classic book included the
first detailed application of hydrodynamic principles to the study of the
circulation of the blood. In 1833 Wilhelm Weber investigated the mechanism
of walking together with his brother Eduard. Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878), right, and Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Weber (1806-1871), left |
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In 1849 Wilhelm Weber returned to his post in Göttingen
and, in 1855, he and Dirichlet became temporary directors of the
astronomical observatory there. Weber's later years at Göttingen were
devoted to work in electrodynamics and the electrical structure of matter.
Weber put forward in 1871 the view that atoms contain positive charges
that are surrounded by rotating negative particles and that the
application of an electric potential to a conductor causes the negative
particles to migrate from one atom to another. He also provided similar
explanations of thermal conduction and thermoelectricity. Wilhelm Eduard Weber |
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Wilhelm Weber was described by Thomas Hirst in the
following way: "He speaks and stutters on unceasingly, one has nothing to
do but listen. Sometimes he laughs for no earthly reason, and one feels
sorry at being not able to join him." Wilhelm Eduard Weber |
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Wilhelm Weber received many honours from England, France,
and Germany, among which were the title of Geheimrat (privy
councillor) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. Many of his
extensive articles are in the six volumes of Resultate aus den
Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins (1837-43), edited by himself
and Gauss. Long term friendship and fruitful scientific collaboration of
Weber and Gauss at the Göttingen University is memorized in this monument.
Monument of Gauss and Weber (standing) in Göttingen |
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Wilhelm Weber died on June 23, 1891 in Göttingen where he was buried. |