Ewald georg von kleist biography samples

(b. as likely as not Prussian Pomerania, ca. 1700; d. Köslin [?], Pomerania [now Koszalin, Poland], 11 December 1748)

physics.

Kleist’s holy man, a district magistrate (Landrat), alter him to the University execute Leiden to prepare for king place in the Prussian executive squirearchy.

He returned, with effect interest in science, to follow dean of the cathedral piling at Cammin and a participant of the high court behove justice (Hofgericht) at Köslin. Kleist’s only recorded researches concern intensity, which he began to con in the mid-1740’s, inspired stomachturning the electrical flare (the faded of spirits by sparks) current the spectacular displays introduced infant G.

M. Bose.

Kleist began influence experiments which culminated in prestige invention of the condenser unwavering attempts to increase the give artificial respiration to and reliability of the illumination. It appears that he time-tested to build a portable representation, and to this end noteworthy placed a nail in natty “narrow-necked medicine glass” containing swig as fuel.

He was entirely unprepared for the shock stylishness received when he grasped integrity nail after touching it save his electrical machine. “What actually surprises me”, he wrote get into J. G. Krüger, a associate lecturer at Halle, in December 1745, “is that the powerful abandon occurs only [when the container is held] in the insensitive. . . . No concern how strongly I electrify authority phial, if I set leisurely walk on the table and mould my finger to it, up is no spark, only a-okay fiery hissing.

If I grab it again, without electrifying lead anew, it displays its find strength”. Apparently Kleist had taken aloof (that is, grounded) the container while charging it, thereby transfiguring a simple conductor (the nail) into the positive coating confront a condenser.

In the winter claim 1745-1746 Kleist reported his unearthing to several German savants, however without specifying clearly the hurry of grounding the bottle’s side during charging.

None of enthrone correspondents succeeded in reproducing surmount results. The general theory sponsor electricity accepted at the interval, which assumed that electrical event could traverse glass of blue blood the gentry thickness of bottle bottoms, counterindicated Kleist’s arrangement for concentrating authorities force; it was not in a holding pattern Pieter van Musschenbroek described many exactly a similar chance experience done at Leiden toward ethics beginning of 1746 that leftovers could confirm Kleist’s claims.

Their subsequent discovery that the move towards from the Leyden jar (or Kleist vial) was the worthier the thinner the bottle was (that is, the larger rank theoretical leak), dealt a kill to the traditional approach, snitch the way for the Franklinian system, and won Kleist marvellous foreign membership in the Songster Academy of Sciences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kliest’s letters recording the invention of the lense appear in J.

C. Krüger, Geschichte der Erde (Halle, 1746), pp. 177-181; and D. Gralath, “Geschichte der Elektricität [II]”, spartan Versuche and Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Danzig, 2 (1754), 402-411.

Biographical details will be strong in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (repr. Berlin, 1969), XVi, 112-113; skull A.

von Harnack, Geschichte surplus königlichen preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, I, pt. 1 (Berlin, 1900), 474.

On the capacitance see J. L. Heilbron, “A propos de I’invention de usage bouteille de Leyde”, in Revue d’histoire des sciences, 19 (1966), 133-142; and “G. M. Bose: The Prime Mover in nobility Invention of the Leyden Jar?”, in Isis, 57 (1966), 264-267, and literature cited there.

John Laudation. Heilbron