Background
Max Margules was born on April 23, 1856, in Brody, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Brody, Rivnens'ka Oblast', Ukraine).
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria
Max Margules studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and in 1877 joined the staff of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie in Vienna as a volunteer.
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria
Max Margules studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and in 1877 joined the staff of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie in Vienna as a volunteer.
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1881
chemist mathematician meteorologist physicist
Max Margules was born on April 23, 1856, in Brody, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Brody, Rivnens'ka Oblast', Ukraine).
Max Margules studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and in 1877 he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree and joined the staff of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie in Vienna as a volunteer. From 1879 to 1880 he continued his studies at Berlin.
In 1981 Max Margules returned to Vienna as Privatdozent in Physics, an unpaid position, but one which allowed him to lecture students. Students' fees gave him some income. Later, the administration offered this teaching job to someone else after he refused to convert from Judaism to acquire the position, which ended his academic career. In 1882 he resigned from this post, thus terminating his career at the university. He was then re-employed by the Zentralanstalt until 1906. During this time Margules produced a small number of highly important papers in meteorology. In 1906, at the age of fifty, he retired and gave up meteorology, again concentrating on physical chemistry, apparently because of embitterment at the lack of recognition for his work. Lonely, unmarried and without close friends, he literally starved to death during the austere postwar period.
After returning to the Zentralanstalt in 1882, Margules continued to pursue physical and physical-chemical investigations in his free time. His publication dealt with electrodynamics, the physical chemistry of gasses, and hydrodynamics. Independently of Gibbs and Duhem, he developed in 1895 a formula for the relation between the partial vapor pressures and the composition of binary liquid vapor pressure known as the Duhem-margules equation. In 1881-1882 he furnished a theoretical analysis of the rotational oscillations of viscous fluids in a cylinder.
From 1890 to 1893 Margules produced a series of papers related to meteorology that dealt with osciallation periods of the earth’s atmosphere and the solar semidiurnal barometric pressure oscillation, the universal character of which had been established by his colleague Hann. William Thomson had suggested that the magnitude of this oscillation could be explained by a resonance oscillation of the entire atmosphere. Margules substantiated this hypothesis theoretically by computing free and forced oscillations of the atmosphere on the basis of Laplace’s tidal theory. He never considered his results to be a rigorous proof, however, because of several unrealistic assumptions and the lack to a physical explanation for the semidiurnal temperature variation. Margules also investigated the oscillations of a periodically heated atmosphere, using various heating models, and gave a general classification of these motions.
While these studies still tended toward theoretical physics, Margules’ next investigations dealt in a novel manner with problems fundamental to meteorology. In 1901 he demonstrated that the kinetic energy displayed in storms was far too great to be derived from the potential energy of the pressure field. He reduced the pressure field, which meteorologists had previously regarded as an explanation for the genesis of atmospheric motions, to a mere “cog-wheel in the storm’s machinery.”
Margules, one of the founders of dynamical meteorology, was unquestionably a brilliant theoretician, the true value of whose work was adequately appreciated only after his death. Along with Julius von Hann, he is seen as a father of modern meteorology. He received the Hann Medal of Acknowledgement in 1919.
In a famous 1905 paper, Margules proposed a new source for the production of kinetic energy by studying models of energy transformations in the atmosphere that involved the isentropic redistribution of warm and cold air masses from a state of instability to one of stability. He showed that the realizable kinetic energy of these closed systems was the difference between the sums of internal energy and gravitational potential energy at the beginning and the and the end of the redistribution process, Margules considered this quantity, which is now called available potential energy, as the source of kinetic energy in storms. His theoretical analyses supported F. H. Bigelow’s view that the coexistence of warm and cold air masses is the precondition for the development of storms. The cyclone model subsequently developed by J. Bjerknes was based energetically largely on Margules’ work. Margules’ results formed the basis for F. M. Exner’s and A. Refsdal’s investigations and have continued to influence meteorological thought. The work of E. Lorenz is an example.
In his discussion of idealized situations in which there is a large store of available potential energy (1906), Margules demonstrated that on the rotating earth two air masses of different temperatures, separated by an inclined surface of discontinuity, can exist in equilibrium under certain conditions. He developed a formula for the slope of this surface, using methods developed by Helmholtz. Bjerknes and his group later applied Margules’ formula to their cyclone model, in which such frontal surfaces were the salient feature.
Margules considered the study of detailed observations, distributed three-dimensionally, to be of utmost importance for progress in meteorological theory. For this reason, in 1895 he began to install a small network of stations around Vienna. Observations from these and nearby mountain stations allowed him to study the progression of cold and warm air masses and sudden variations in barometric pressure and wind during the passage of storms; these observations influenced his theoretical considerations and vice versa.
Margules also attempted to determine the frictional dissipation of kinetic energy and made the first estimate of the efficiency of the general circulation of the atmosphere as a thermodynamic engine. One of his last meteorological investigations, which dealt with the development of temperature inversions by descending motion and divergence, contributed to the understanding of anticyclones.
Like Hann and Bezold, Margules considered weather forecasting as premature; he has been quoted as saying that forecasting is "immoral and damaging to the character of a meteorologist.''
Margules was an introverted and lonely man, who never married and worked in isolation, not collaborating with other scientists. He was disappointed and disillusioned at the lack of recognition of his work and retired from the Meteorological Institute in 1906, aged only fifty, on a modest pension. Its value was severely eroded during the First World War so that his 400 crowns per month was worth about one Euro, insufficient for more than the most meagre survival. His colleagues tried their best to help him, making repeated offers of help which Margules resolutely resisted. He died of starvation in 1920.
Max Margules was never married and had no children.
