Joseph Xaver Liesganig

Background

Liesganig was born on February 13, 1719, in Graz, Austria, the son of Wolfgang Lisganig, Hofmeister of Graz, and his wife Rosalie.

Education

Liesganig entered the Society of Jesus in 1734 and received his education at the Jesuit College in Vienna.

Career

From 1742 to 1751 Liesganig served the order in various academic and ecclesiastical posts (having been ordained in 1749) in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia; in 1752 he returned to the Vienna Jesuit College as professor matheseos. At the same time, he was attached to the Jesuit astronomical observatory (of which he was appointed prefect in 1756, a position he held until the order was suppressed in 1773) and professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. He was made dean of the university’s philosophical faculty in 1771.

Liesganig’s scientific carrier may be said to have begun with his prefecture of the observatory. In 1757, at the suggestion of Bošković, Liesganig constructed with Joseph Ramspoeck a ten-foot zenith sector that indicated tangents instead of angles. He also designed a quadrant (built by Ramspoeck) with a radius of two and one-half feet; it was provided with micrometer screws for accuracy in reading. Another of Liebig’s instruments consisted of a Graham clock fitted with a gridiron compensation pendulum.

In 1758 Liesganig had used his zenith sector to determine the latitude of Vienna to be 48°12′34.5″. In 1760 Maria Theresia, at Bošković’s urging, commissioned Liesganig to survey the environs of the city. Liesganig for this purpose obtained from Canivet a copy of the Paris toise, on which he calibrated the Vienna fathom. During the following years, Liesganig established a series of bases near Wiener Neustadt and in the Marchfeld region; he incorporated these into a triangulation system with the azimuth of ML Leopold, near Vienna, and calculated the geographic latitudes of Warasdin, Brian (Brno), and Graz. He also carried out experiments with a seconds pendulum (1765) to determine the length of the Vienna fathom, and made computations with a sphere in which the reduction to sea level represented 2.3 fathoms per degree of meridian.

In 1769 Liesganig undertook a survey in Hungary between Szeged and Peterwardein (now Petrovaradin, Yugoslavia). For this purpose, he constructed bases near Kistelek and Csuróg and linked them, by a chain of twenty-six triangles, to the meridian of Budapest. In connection with this project, Liesganig wrote a manual on map-making methods, preserved in manuscript in the Vienna war archives.

From 1772 until 1774 Liesganig was engaged in a trigonometric survey of East Galicia and Lodomeria (now Vladimir-Volynsky, Ukrainian S.S.R.), which had just become a part of that province. He made use of five brass quadrants that had been built to his specifications by Ramspoeck and the Viennese clock-maker Schreibelmayer; each was equipped with a movable telescope having a cross-hair micrometer at the focal point and a fixed telescope having a micrometer at the focal point of a microscope. During the same period, Liesganig observed solar azimuths in Lemberg, near Cracow, and in Rzeszow, reducing all the measurements to the meridian and clock of the Lemberg observatory. At the same time, he held the position of Imperial and Royal Building Inspector in that city, and from 1775 was a professor of mechanics at the Collegium Nobilium there, as well as provincial director of military engineering and navigation.

Liesganig made six circular maps from his data of the Lemberg area, although these lacked place names and topographical information. In 1784 he reviewed the cadastral survey of the area of Gutenbrunn, in Lower Austria; the following year he took over the direction of the cadastral survey of Galicia and prepared for it a manual that was translated into Polish, Czech, Slovene, and Italian. In this work, he recommended that measurements be made in local linear units to permit their comparison to the Vienna fathom.

Achievements

• Liesganig is known as one of those scientifically active Jesuits who intensively studied the Earth. Due to his special geodetic achievements, the Vienna Observatory became the length reference point of Austria-Hungary, which was later transferred to the new observatory on the Türkenschanze.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Tabulae memoriales praecipua arithmeticae: Tum numericae tum literalis, geometriae, etiam curvarum, et trigonometriae, atque utriusque architecturae ... complexae, in usum auditorum

    (Latin Edition)

  • Dimensio graduum meridiani Viennensis et Hungarici augg. jussu et auspiciis peracta a Josepho Liesganig, Societatis Jesu 1770

Connections

Nothing is known of Liesganig's family.

Father:

Wolfgang Lisganig

Mother:

Rosalie Liesganig

colleague:

Roger Boscovich

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 7
  1973