Philipp Lenard

Phillip Lenard died at the age of 84 on 20 May 1947 in Messelhausen, Germany.

Philipp Lenard was born in Bratislava, Pressburg, Hungary, on 7 June 1862. His father, Philipp von Lenardis was a wealthy wine maker and wholesaler in Pressburg. His mother, Antonie Baumann died young and Lenard was brought up by his aunt. She eventually married his father.

He started his schooling at 'A Pozsonyi királyi katholikus fögymnasium´ where he was deeply impressed by his teacher, Virgil Klatt.

After a lot of arguments, his father permitted him to carry on his studies at the Technische Hochsculen in Vienna and Budapest. In 1880, he studied physics and chemistry there.

In 1883, he moved to Heidelberg in Germany, where he studied physics for four semesters under Robert Bunsen, who had always been a “secret object of worship”. He matriculated at Heidelberg in 1883–1884.

In the summer of 1885, he started working on his doctoral thesis in Berlin and completed it in 1887 at Heidelberg.

His first significant discovery was in 1889 when he found out that phosphorescence is caused by the occurrence of very small quantities of copper, bismuth, or manganese.

He spent three years as an assistant at Heidelberg, and then went to England to work in the electromagnetic and engineering laboratories of the “City and guides of the London Central Institution.”

On 1st April 1891, he came to Bonn to work under the famous scientist Heirich Hertz. After Hertz’s death in 1894, Lenard took charge of the publication of Hertz’s three-volume book, ‘Gesammelte Werke’.

In 1892, he qualified as a lecturer with a work on hydroelectricity even though he was mainly engaged in cathode ray experiments.

In 1892, he succeeded in constructing a tube with a ‘Lenard window’, which would direct the Cathode rays into either open air or a second evacuated space.

Philipp Lenard discovered a way to study the cathode radiation outside the glass tube by equipping it with a thin aluminium window. Albert Einstein’s hypothesis of light quanta further proved this interpretation.