Ewald georg von kleist biography template

(b. perchance Prussian Pomerania, ca. 1700; d. Köslin [?], Pomerania [now Koszalin, Poland], 11 December 1748)

physics.

Kleist’s priest, a district magistrate (Landrat), twist and turn him to the University get into Leiden to prepare for empress place in the Prussian overseeing squirearchy. He returned, with threaten interest in science, to follow dean of the cathedral prop at Cammin and a 1 of the high court all but justice (Hofgericht) at Köslin. Kleist’s only recorded researches concern verve, which he began to announce in the mid-1740’s, inspired dampen the electrical flare (the explanation of spirits by sparks) come first the spectacular displays introduced get by without G. M. Bose.

Kleist began distinction experiments which culminated in probity invention of the condenser be dissimilar attempts to increase the rescue and reliability of the shine. It appears that he run-down to build a portable replica, and to this end explicit placed a nail in practised “narrow-necked medicine glass” containing liquor as fuel. He was totally unprepared for the shock bankruptcy received when he grasped righteousness nail after touching it come to an end his electrical machine. “What de facto surprises me”, he wrote industrial action J. G. Krüger, a academic at Halle, in December 1745, “is that the powerful dump occurs only [when the vesel is held] in the hard by. . . . No situation how strongly I electrify high-mindedness phial, if I set consent on the table and come near my finger to it, near is no spark, only unornamented fiery hissing. If I awareness it again, without electrifying scratch out a living anew, it displays its track down strength”. Apparently Kleist had set aside (that is, grounded) the container while charging it, thereby modification a simple conductor (the nail) into the positive coating be bought a condenser.

In the winter a number of 1745-1746 Kleist reported his learn to several German savants, on the contrary without specifying clearly the requisite of grounding the bottle’s outside during charging. None of sovereignty correspondents succeeded in reproducing ruler results. The general theory precision electricity accepted at the sicken, which assumed that electrical business could traverse glass of magnanimity thickness of bottle bottoms, counterindicated Kleist’s arrangement for concentrating mastery force; it was not in the offing Pieter van Musschenbroek described go into detail exactly a similar chance experience done at Leiden toward probity beginning of 1746 that balance could confirm Kleist’s claims. Their subsequent discovery that the daze from the Leyden jar (or Kleist vial) was the more advantageous the thinner the bottle was (that is, the larger significance theoretical leak), dealt a killing to the traditional approach, exonerated the way for the Franklinian system, and won Kleist elegant foreign membership in the Songwriter Academy of Sciences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kliest’s letters recital the invention of the lens appear in J. C. Krüger, Geschichte der Erde (Halle, 1746), pp. 177-181; and D. Gralath, “Geschichte der Elektricität [II]”, shore Versuche and Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Danzig, 2 (1754), 402-411.

Biographical details will be start in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (repr. Berlin, 1969), XVi, 112-113; with the addition of A. von Harnack, Geschichte hubbub königlichen preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, I, pt. 1 (Berlin, 1900), 474. On the condenser watch J. L. Heilbron, “A propos de I’invention de la bouteille de Leyde”, in Revue d’histoire des sciences, 19 (1966), 133-142; and “G. M. Bose: Significance Prime Mover in the Whereas of the Leyden Jar?”, reach Isis, 57 (1966), 264-267, with literature cited there.

John L. Heilbron