Johannes Stark

Johannes Stark Luise Uepler and the couple had five children.

He died on 21 June 1957, at the age of 83, in Traunstein, Germany.

Johannes Stark was born in Schickenhof, Kingdom of Bavaria on 15 April 1874. His father was a land owner.

He received his early education from Bayreuth Gymnasium (secondary school) and after the stint at Bayreuth he went on to study at Regensburg.

In 1894, he enrolled at the University of Munich and graduated in 1897. He studied physics and mathematics along with chemistry at the university and submitted a doctoral dissertation on Newton's electrochronic rings in a certain type of dim media..

Following his graduation from the University of Munich, he worked at the Physics Institute at the University of Munich, in different capacities. In 1900, he became unsalaried university lecturer of physics at the University of Göttingen.

Johannes Stark was appointed ‘extraordinary professor’ by the Technische Hochschule in Hannover in 1906 and after spending three years at that institution, he was appointed as a professor at the RWTH Aachen University. He taught at the latter institute for eight years.

In 1907, Stark asked the then little known Albert Einstein to write a piece on his principle of relativity for the scientific journal Jahbruch der Radioktivitat und Elektronik. He was the editor of the journal and was impressed with the theory in general.

In 1913, he discovered his most important discovery as a physicist, which was named ‘Stark Effect’. It refers to the shifting and splitting of spectral lines of atoms and molecules due to presence of an external electric field.

In 1917, the University of Greifswald appointed him as a professor and two years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his findings that later came to be known as the ‘Stark Effect’.

In 1920, he was employed by the University of Wurzberg in the capacity of a professor in the physics institute in the university and he stayed at the university for two years. After having won the Nobel Prize, he had used the prize money to set up a private laboratory of his own and he continued his experiments.

His scientific works cover three large fields: the electric currents in gases, spectroscopic analysis, and chemical valency. He produced more than 300 papers on different scientific findings but his most important work was that of demonstrating ‘Stark Effect’. A finding for which he won the Nobel Prize.