Background
Ernst Pringsheim was born on July 11, 1859, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). Pringsheim was the son of Siegmund Pringsheim, a merchant and lord of a manor, and Anna Guradze.
2nd High School, ul. Parkowa 18–26 Wrocław, 51-616 Poland
Ernst Pringsheim attended Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium for his primary education.
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
From 1877 Pringsheim studied mathematics for three semesters at Heidelberg University.
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland
Pringsheim studied mathematics for three semesters at Heidelberg and from 6 November 1878 to 9 August 1879 at Breslau.
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Pringsheim studied at the University of Berlin from the autumn of 1879. He received the Ph.D. under Helmholtz on 3 July 1882.
educator physician physicist scientist
Ernst Pringsheim was born on July 11, 1859, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). Pringsheim was the son of Siegmund Pringsheim, a merchant and lord of a manor, and Anna Guradze.
After attending the Magdalenengymnasium and the Johannesgymnasium, leaving the latter at Easter 1877, Pringsheim studied mathematics for three semesters at Heidelberg and from 6 November 1878 to 9 August 1879 at Breslau, then physics and mathematics at Berlin from the autumn of 1879. He received the Ph.D. under Helmholtz on 3 July 1882.
After receiving the Ph.D. under Helmholtz on 3 July 1882, Pringsheim was qualified as a lecturer by habilitation in physics at the University of Berlin on 5 January 1886. He was given the title of professor on 30 October 1896 and on 28 August 1905 and then was appointed a full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Breslau, where his close collaborator Otto Lummer had preceded him six months earlier.
Pringsheim’s first lecture in Berlin (1886) was “Mechanische Warmetheorie und kinetische Theorie der Gase.”
In the winter of 1886-1887, he discussed “Thermodynamik elektrischer Vorgange,” a topic connected with R. Clausius’ earlier studies as well as with Planck's investigations nine years later. From 1889-1890 to 1905, he delivered nearly every year a one-hour experimental lecture on “Physik der Sonne”; a book on the subject, containing twelve lectures, appeared in 1910. Pringsheim often connected solar physics with a lecture entitled “Einfiihrung in die physikalische Chemie.” His lectures from 1897-1898 to 1904 covered alternately “Interferenz und Polarisation des Lichtes” and astrophysics.
Despite his later appointment in theoretical physics at Breslau, Pringsheim’s scientific production was largely experimental. At Berlin, it was characterized by a period of research done alone and in experimental cooperation with Lummer from 1896.
In 1881 he had replaced the lenses of the spectrometer with hollow specula and thus had made more accurate measurements of wavelengths in the infrared with the diffraction grating. He was the first to develop the radiometer into a useful instrument for measuring infrared radiation. In the following years, Pringsheim had not yet come to specialize in radiation but dealt, among other things, with chemical effects of light on hydrochloric acid gas. He also cooperated with the philologist E. Schwan of Jena to investigate the French accent phonometrically and with the lawyer Otto Gradenwitz of Konigsberg to reconstruct old palimpsests by photography.
Pringsheim’s period of cooperation with Lummer began toward the end of the nineteenth century. First, they treated the experimental determination of the ratio (K) of the specific heats for various gases, researches that had begun in the 1880s.
In 1896 they turned to investigations of heat radiation. Continuing Wilhelm Wien’s work at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt at Berlin, Pringsheim assisted Lummer in implementing Kirchhoff's concept of the blackbody. By this new means, they began to verify the law of Joseph Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann for the temperature dependence of total radiated energy. In 1900 they recognized that the small systematic deviations of their observations from the theoretical law were due to an insufficient connection of the thermoelectric temperature scale with the scale of the gas thermometer (in 1907 and in the I960’s the scale had to be corrected again); Stefan’s law was thus verified. Pringsheim and Lummer then measured the spectral distribution of the radiation energy with the aid of the cylindrical blackbody.
Although in 1899 they stated a variability of the exponential constant of Wien’s equation with the wavelength and although they discovered even a slight curvature of the isochromatics in contradiction to that equation, it was not until September 1900 that Pringsheim and Lummer published a paper stating the “invalidity of the Wien-Planck spectral equation” on these grounds.
At Breslau, Pringsheim established a six-term course in theoretical physics in 1906.
Pringsheim’s doctoral dissertation of 1882 ultimately determined the direction of his research, heat and light radiation. In physics, at the beginning of the 1890s, Pringsheim studied the limits of the validity of Kirchhoff’s law. He argued that it should apply only in the case of pure temperature radiation, as Kirchhoff had stated, and not, for example, to the radiation in Geissler’s tube or in a flame (because of chemical reactions). This view led to a dispute with Friedrich Paschen, who stated that gases may also radiate when stimulated by temperature alone. The entire question, in which Robert von Helmholtz, the son of Hermann von Helmholtz, and Willem Henri Julius of Utrecht had earlier been interested, to a certain degree, contributed to the recognition of the limits of the law in connection with the role of line spectra. Pringsheim denied that line spectra of a flame could be included in Kirchhoff’s law because they would be caused by chemical influences, but it is known today that he went too far. Kirchhoff's law again interested Pringsheim in 1900 and 1901, when he gave a new simple theoretical proof of it that did not presume the complete blackbody, completely diathermanous substances, and completely reflecting walls. He was attacked for that proof by David Hilbert in 1912.
He had sought to return to his native town, Breslau, since 1895, and for much of his life, he was a member of the Schlesische Gesellschaft fur vaterlandische Cultur. As early as 1879 he read a paper on his geomagnetic measurements before this society, and later he was its secretary and also its president.
Pringsheim had a reputation of having a bright personality, so his delivery of lectures was clear and animated by humor.