Background

Johann Christian Poggendorff was born on December 29, 1796, in Hamburg, Germany. Poggendorff was born into a well-to-do family, but his father lost nearly the entire fortune during the French occupation of Hamburg (1806-1811). His father, a wealthy manufacturer, having been all but ruined by the French siege.

Education

Poggendorff was educated first at the Johanneum in Hamburg and then, from 1807, at a boarding school in Schiffbeck, near Hamburg. Ambition and a strong inclination towards a scientific career led him to move to Berlin, where he entered Humboldt University in 1820.

Career

At age fifteen Poggendorff became an apprentice in a Hamburg apothecary shop. Later he worked as an apothecary’s assistant in Itzehoe. Because of his poor financial situation, he had scarcely any prospect of ever owning his own apothecary shop. Moreover, he was strongly drawn to the study of chemistry and physics. Consequently, in 1820 he followed the advice of a former schoolmate at Schiftbeck, F. F. Runge, to study science in Berlin. He shared lodgings with Runge, who later became a distinguished chemist.

Poggendorff eagerly devoted himself to science and carried out many experiments. Already by 1820, he had invented, independently of Schweigger, a galvanoscope (multiplier), the sensitivity of which he increased in 1826 through an arrangement that enabled him to take readings by reflection. This device was used by Gauss in his observations on magnetism. In 1823 Poggendorff was commissioned for a small salary by the Berlin Academy to make meteorological observations.

In 1824, at age twenty-eight, Poggendorff took over the editorship of the renowned Annalen der Physik und Chemie. In 1830 he received, as a Privatgelehrter, the title Koniglicher Professor. In 1834 he became an extraordinary professor at the University of Berlin and in 1839 was named a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He received offers of full professorships from other universities but rejected them; for he considered Berlin to be the right place for his activity as editor of the Annalen and for his historical, biographical, and bibliographical research. Until 1875, he gave lectures at the university, primarily on the history of physics and on physical geography.

It might seem astonishing that Poggendorff, who was only twenty-seven at the time, was chosen to edit the Annalen der Physik and Chemie (founded in 1790) upon the death, in 1824, of the previous editor, L. W. Gilbert. Yet we know that Poggendorff was very resolute in his dealings with the publisher, J. A. Barth, and even hinted that if turned down he would found his own journal, especially as he had already obtained the support of many prominent scientists.

In addition, the journal published supplementary volumes and pamphlets. Eventually, Poggendorff gave up personal supervision of the articles on chemistry and confined himself to physics. Thoroughly imbued with the values of empiricism, he rejected manuscripts that were speculative in nature and placed the greatest stress on articles with an experimental basis. Following Poggendorff’s death, he was succeeded as editor by Gustav Wiedemann.

Poggendorff’s historical interests, expressed in his lectures and in a book on the history of physics, issued in a project to which he wholeheartedly devoted himself: the Biographisch-Literarische Handworterhuch zur Geschichre der exakten Wissenschaften. The original two-volume work first appeared in 1863. He included dates and bibliographical references for 8,400 researchers in the exact sciences of all periods and countries up to the year 1858. This useful publication attests its compiler’s immense capacity for work. The work has continued to be published and by 1974 comprised some eighteen individual volumes.

Achievements

• Poggendorff's achievements in the field of experimental physics, in addition to the invention of the multiplier, included the compensating circuit for determining the electromotive force of constant and inconstant circuits; research on induction; experiments with A. W. Holtz’s electrical influence machine (electric power transmission); determination of the electromotive series in dilute sulfuric acid and in potassium cyanide; construction of a silver voltameter, of a record (for measuring resistances), of an electric balance (for the study of polarization phenomena), of an improved sine galvanometer, of a thermopile, of a mercurial air pump, and of an Atwood’s machine; and, finally, the demonstration of the existence of the Peltier effect in magnetoelectric currents.
  
  Poggendorff worked in three areas of physics. He was an excellent experimenter and devised various measuring devices that were appropriate to his research; he skillfully edited the Annalen der Physik und Chemie for more than half a century, and he took an intense interest in the history of physics. Most notably, he produced an indispensable biographical-bibliographical reference work in the history of the exact sciences that is now called simply “Poggendorff.”
  
  In the course of his fifty-two years of editorial activity, Poggendorff brought out 160 volumes of the Annalen, for which he procured first-rate original contributions and in which he also presented translations of important foreign papers.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Annalen Der Physik Und Chemie

    (Vol. 111)

    1835
  • Annalen Der Physik Und Chemie

    (Vol. 6)

    1835
  • Annalen Der Physik Und Chemie

    (Vol. 31)

    1834
  • Annalen Der Physik Und Chemie

    (Vol. 103)

    1833
  • Annalen der Physik und Chemie 1854
  • Biographich-Literarisches Handwörterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, Zweiter Band, M - Z 1898
  • Lebenslinien zur Geschichte der Exacten Wissenschaften Seit Wiederherstellung Derselben 1853
  • Annalen Der Physik Und Chemie 1862

Membership

In 1839 Poggendorff was named a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Personality

Despite his very full work schedule, Poggendorff was sociable and a generous host.

Physical Characteristics: In the spring of 1876, he began to suffer from painful neuralgia, and he died the following year at the age of eighty.

Connections

Poggendorff married in 1831 and by 1838 had three children from his happy marriage.

Daughter:

Marie Poggendorff

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1975
• Johann Christian Poggendorff: Leichenrede
  2019