Background
Ernest Karl Abbe was born on January 23, 1840, in Eisenach, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, to Georg Adam Abbe and Elisabeth Christina Barchfeldt. His father was a foreman in a spinnery.
Ernst Karl Abbe
Universitas Litterarum Jenensis, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, The Old University Building
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Inner courtyard with cafeteria of the Old University Building
University of Gottingen, Alte Aula (Great Hall), also Karzer, at Wilhelmsplatz, built in 1835–1837
University of Gottingen, the old building of the university and its library in 1815
Ernst Karl Abbe, 1875
1890: Start of diversification: new products lead to new businesses for #ZEISS.
Jena in former times
Jena from 1846 to 1896
Die Entstehung des Glaswerks von Schott & Gen. Nach gleichzeitigen Schriftstücken aus amtlichem und persönlichem Besitz zwischen dem März 1882 und dem Januar 1885.
Monument to Ernst Abbe by Klinger, Max, Germany, Thuringia, Jena, Ernst Abbe Denkmal (Optical Museum)
Ernst Abbe with Jena university professors, 1894
Abbe`s dilatometer, 1893
Universitas Litterarum Jenensis, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, The Old University Building
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Inner courtyard with cafeteria of the Old University Building
University of Gottingen, Alte Aula (Great Hall), also Karzer, at Wilhelmsplatz, built in 1835–1837
University of Gottingen, the old building of the university and its library in 1815
Eisenach Gymnasium, Germany
Ernst Karl Abbe, 1875
1890: Start of diversification: new products lead to new businesses for #ZEISS.
Jena in former times
The Carl Zeiss Company developed the first modern planetarium projectors in Germany in the early 1920s.
Jena from 1846 to 1896
Ernst Abbe memorial, FRIEDRICH SCHILLER UNIVERSITAT JENA
commemorative plaque with a portrait of Ernst Abbe and the set of formulas for the microscope in Eisenach, Germany
Die Entstehung des Glaswerks von Schott & Gen. Nach gleichzeitigen Schriftstücken aus amtlichem und persönlichem Besitz zwischen dem März 1882 und dem Januar 1885.
Monument to Ernst Abbe by Klinger, Max, Germany, Thuringia, Jena, Ernst Abbe Denkmal (Optical Museum)
Ernst Abbe with Jena university professors, 1894
Ernst Abbe`s birthplace in Eisenach
Ernst Abbe and his wife Else Abbe,
Dr. at the front gate of his house, circa 1900
Abbe`s dilatometer, 1893
Else Snell Abbe
Friederich Otto Schott, German chemist, glass technologist, inventor
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(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.)
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entrepreneur physicist reformer scientist
Ernest Karl Abbe was born on January 23, 1840, in Eisenach, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, to Georg Adam Abbe and Elisabeth Christina Barchfeldt. His father was a foreman in a spinnery.
Ernst's father would never have been able to send his son through high school and university if his employers had not provided a scholarship for the intelligent and industrious youth. Upon graduating from the Eisenach Gymnasium in 1857, Abbe studied physics in Jena and subsequently in Gottingen, where he received the doctorate on 23 March 1861 with a dissertation on thermodynamics.
In 1862 Abbe became a special instructor in mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Jena. In 1863 Abbe joined the University of Jena, rising to professor of physics and mathematics (1870) and director of the astronomical and meteorological observatories (1878).
In 1846 Carl Zeiss, a thirty-year-old mechanic, established his shop in Jena; in 1866, he began a technical and scientific collaboration with Abbe, who was then a lecturer at the university there. Abbe’s fortunes grew with those of the Zeiss company; he had become a partner in 1876 and held a professorship at the university. Within ten years, the once small Zeiss workshop developed into an internationally famous industrial enterprise. The company’s apochromatic lens was the greatest advance in technical optics made to that date. At the same period, Abbe began to manifest that interest in social welfare that soon led to the creation of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.
Among the Gottingen professors who exerted a lasting influence on him were the mathematician Riemann, the famous exponent of the theory of functions, and the physicist Wilhelm Weber, former assistant to Gauss and one of the “Gottingen Seven,” who had been temporarily suspended because of their protest against the king of Hannover’s violation of the constitution.
Abbe’s decision to apply for the position of lecturer at Jena University must not have been an easy one to make, since there would be a two-year interval, with its inevitable economic hardships, between his doctorate and his inauguration. He managed to make ends meet by accepting a poorly paid teaching position with the Physikalischer Verein in Frankfurt am Main, a group founded by local citizens for the propagation of the natural sciences. He also did some private tutoring.
On 8 August 1863, at the age of twenty three, Abbe finally achieved his ambition and was admitted to the faculty of Jena University as lecturer in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. In 1866 he was asked by Carl Zeiss for help in establishing the construction of Zeiss microscopes, and from 1869 to 1871 Abbe worked for Zeiss, setting up the bases for optical calculations of these microscopes. Abbe’s straitened circumstances did not improve until he was made associate professor in 1870. In 1876 Abbe’s economic difficulties were resolved when Zeiss offered him a partnership. During the preceding ten years Abbe had contributed eminently to the phenomenal rise of Zeiss’s company; he now shared in the quite considerable profits.
Zeiss had early begun experiments to convert the production of his microscope, consisting of an objective and an ocular lens, into a scientific process; whereas formerly he had relied on trial and error to find the best lenses, he now wished to use scientific methods. In this effort, Zeiss had met with as little success as his teacher Friedrich Korner; he had also attempted to use the knowledge of the mathematician Friedrich Barfuss. After the latter’s death, Zeiss remained unable to solve this problem because of his limited scientific training. He therefore turned to Abbe in 1866 and succeeded in interesting the young physicist in the systematic production of microscopes.
During the following decade they constructed the machinery required for industrial production and turned out many commercially marketed instruments (illuminating apparatus for the microscope, known in England as “the Abbe,” the Abbe refractometer, and others). Abbe also solved their main problem so completely and ingeniously that his theoretical findings became the basis for the further development of practical optics for decades to come. For example, in 1934 Frits Zernike derived from these findings the phase-contrast process, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics (1953). Somewhat earlier, Hans Busch, on the basis of Abbe’s theory, had seen the possibility of developing electron microscopes.
The success of the Zeiss microscopes led to Abbe's partnership in the firm in 1875.
In 1880 he recruited the German glassmaker Friederich Otto Schott to make new forms of scientific glass, and in 1884 they established the Glass Technical Laboratory of Schott & Genossen in Jena, co-owned by Schott, Abbe, Zeiss and Zeiss' son Rodench. Two years later they issued their first price list for optical glass. At that time Abbe hired Paul Rudolph to help calculate apochromatic objectives. In 1890 Abbe and Rudolph introduced anastigmat lenses, forerunners of the Protar and Tessar.
After Carl Zeiss died in 1888, Abbe bought out Roderich's half of the business, set up the Carl Zeiss Foundation and, in 1891, deeded the Zeiss works (and later his interest in Schott & Genossen) to the foundation. Concerned with employee welfare, he set up a profit-sharing plan and, in 1900, established an eight-hour work day for Zeiss employees.
Today it is difficult to realize the magnitude of the effect that the above theoretical considerations exerted on the optical production of the Jena workshop. The effort to discover a better chromatic correction of the micro objective is also noteworthy. In his report on his visit to the South Kensington Exposition in London (1876), which had an excellent optical section, Abbe points out the causes for this shortcoming: the refusal of the glassworks to consider not only economic but also scientific interests in the application of glass smelting. Nevertheless, his report led one glass chemist, Otto Schott, to undertake this task.
Joining forces with Zeiss and Abbe, Schott perfected production methods in the Jena glassworks of Schott & Associates by refining a great number of new optical glasses to high perfection. Ten years after the London Exposition, the Zeiss Works celebrated its greatest triumph to that date with the development of an apochromatic system in which not only the primary but also the secondary color spectrum had been eliminated.
Of no lesser importance is the change in Ernst Abbe’s personal outlook that occurred at this time and turned the physicist into a social reformer of equal stature. Having become sole owner of the optical plant and its share in the glassworks, after the death of Carl Zeiss in 1888 and the departure from the firm of the latter’s son Roderich, in 1891 he created the Carl Zeiss Foundation, to which he bequeathed his personal fortune, with his wife’s approval. In the foundation’s charter—which in some respects later served the Prussian state as the model for its progressive social legislation (then generally admired) and turned over the larger part of the profits to the University of Jena—Abbe originated an economic system that unites socialism and capitalism. The economist Alfred Weber, in Volume I of Schriften der Heidelberger Aktionsgruppe zur Demokralie und zum freien Sozialismus (1947), proposed a voluntary socialization of German industry modeled after the Carl Zeiss Foundation.
Abbe’s two most important scientific achievements were in radiation optics (the “sine condition”) and undulatory optics (“Beitrage zur Theorie des Mikroskops und der mikroskopischen Wahrnehmung,” 1873). In 1868 he invented the apochromatic lens system for the microscope. This important breakthrough eliminates both the primary and secondary colour distortion of microscopes.
Other optical advances which Abbe made include a clearer theoretical understanding of limits to magnification and the discovery the Abbe sine condition, as it is called today, which gives conditions on a lens for it to form a sharp image, without the defects of coma and spherical aberration.
He also made practical improvements in microscope design including, in 1870, the use of a condenser to give a high-powered even illumination of the field of view.
In terms of social reforms Abee was instrumental here as well. For example, he introduced industrial relations changes into the Zeiss optical works in 1896 which today sound commonplace but were many years ahead of their time. These included an 8 hour working day, disability assistance, holiday pay, sick pay, and pensions.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.)
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Interestingly, Ernst Abbe, who later held a co-partnership in the ownership of Zeiss AG, was recorded as having had somewhat of a spirituality based on St. Francis of Assisi’s view of nature:
“There was a common trait in the persons of the founders at an approximate look appeared an ascetic, a puritan. And yet none of them had come with the drive for asceticism from the world. Who had so loved the spoiled golden youth of Assisi in his more perilous fight to renounce the luxury, as had the son of Eisenacher textile worker: and so the others found the motives of that saint along their way. And, with the unshakable seriousness required for implementing a clearly identified mission in life, there is always linked that other deeply characteristic trait: the deep reverence of poverty. And through this reverence they took away the fear of poverty’s sting; and it led them, rather than into the bare penitent or proletarian dwellings, no, quite the contrary, out of the stone deserts of cities in the freest nature to sunlight and forest resources. Whoever has traveled with Abbe, whoever has got to know his intimate feeling for nature, has known that he has thought not merely about the other mountain hikers; for him, everything that God has created became the source of devotion; which revealed itself in that jubilee hymn to nature: thanks for Brother Sun and Sister Water, wind and clouds, for flower and beast – this rested just as deeply in the soul of a modern freethinking technician, as in the pious soul of the brother of Assisi.”
Quotes from others about the person
Abbe, according to Jena University curator M. Seebeck: “He was born of lowly station, but with predestined claim to scientific fame.”
The Carl Zeiss Foundation describes Abbe's work at this time as follows:
"One year after beginning the manufacture of the Carl Zeiss compound microscope, in 1873, Herr Abbe released a scientific paper describing the mathematics leading to the perfection of this wonderful invention. For the first time in optical design, aberration, diffraction and coma were described and understood. Abbe described the optical process so well that this paper has become the foundation upon which much of our understanding of optical science rests today. As a reward for his efforts Carl Zeiss made Abbe a partner in his burgeoning business in 1876."
Robert Koch, 1904: "A large part of my success, I have been privileged to achieve in science I owe to your excellent microscopes."
On 24 September 1871 Ernst Abbe married Elise Snell, the daughter of Karl Snell, head of the physics department at the University of Jena. The marriage was an extremely happy one from the start. The couple had two daughters.
1844–1914
1872–1945
In 1866 Mr. Abbe was asked by Carl Zeiss for help in establishing the construction of Zeiss microscopes.
In 1880 he recruited the German glassmaker Friederich Otto Schott to make new forms of scientific glass, and in 1884 they established the Glass Technical Laboratory of Schott & Genossen in Jena.
Mr. Abbe hired Paul Rudolph to help calculate apochromatic objectives.
