Wilhelm Weber

Wilhelm Weber never got married. His household was mainly managed by his sister and later by his niece. He was a simple man and loved hiking. Much of his travels were done on foot.

On 23 June 1891, Weber died peacefully in his garden in Göttingen. He was then eighty-six years old. He was buried at old Stadtfriedhof (City Cemetery) in Göttingen.

The ‘weber’, the SI unit of magnetic flux, symbolized by Wb, has been named in his honor.

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was born on 24 October 1804 in Wittenberg. His father, Michael Weber, was Professor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg. Michael had thirteen children, out of which only one daughter and four sons reached adulthood. Wilhelm was his third surviving son.

Among his brothers, the eldest became a minister. His second elder bother Ernst Heinrich became a leading anatomist and physiologist, and a professor at the University of Leipzig. The youngest brother, Eduard, also became a professor of anatomy at Leipzig.

In 1814, Prussia attacked Wittenberg. During the raid, the house the Weber family lived in was destroyed and as the Prussian army captured the city, the university, where his father was a professor, was closed down.

Therefore in 1815, the family shifted to Halle, where Michael Weber became a Professor of Theology at the University of Halle. Until now, Wilhelm had his lessons at home but now in Halle, he was enrolled at the Orphan Asylum and Grammar School.

In 1821, Wilhelm entered Francke Institute, preparing for entry into the University of Halle. At that time, he was only seventeen years old but advanced enough to join his second brother, Ernst Heinrich, in his research on the flow of liquids as well as water and sound waves.

In 1827, Wilhelm Weber joined University of Halle as a Privatdozent. He now started writing his habilitation thesis on reed organ pipes as coupled oscillators with acoustic coupling of tongue and air cavity, submitting it in the same year.

In 1828, he became an Extraordinary Professor of natural philosophy at Halle. Later in September, he accompanied Ernst to Berlin, where the brothers attended the 7th meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte.

Here Wilhelm Weber read a paper on organ pipes. It greatly impressed scholars like Alexander von Humboldt, who was the organizer of the meet, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, a professor at the University of Göttingen, who was at that time interested in geomagnetism.

Gauss was quick to recognize Weber’s potential and realized that the young man would make a great co-worker. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no position available for Weber at Göttingen and so he remained at Halle and published a series of papers on reed organ pipes.

In early 1831, upon the death of Tobias Mayer Jr., a vacancy was created at Göttingen and Weber was offered the position. In April, he joined the University of Göttingen as the Professor of Physics.

Here, he excelled in teaching, illustrating his lectures with experiments. Soon he realized that the students would benefit more if they could perform those experiments themselves. Therefore, he opened his laboratory for the use of his students.

Concurrently, for next six years, he worked closely with Gauss, producing many important papers. The first of them, published in late 1832, was titled ‘Intensitas vis magneticae terrestris ad mensuram absolutam revocata.’ In it, they introduced the absolute units of measurement of magnetism.

The success of this project depended largely on the sensitive magnetometers and other magnetic instruments developed by Weber. Therefore, although the paper was read by Gauss, Weber’s contributions to this work were highly appreciated by the scientific faculty.

In 1833, Gauss and Weber, with the support of Alexander von Humboldt, initiated Göttingen Magnetische Verein, consisting of a network of magnetic observatories across the world. Their goal was to measure the fluctuations of the earth's magnetic field in coordinated form. To get accurate readings, Weber also devised many instruments.