Background
Theodor des Coudres was the son of Julius des Coudres and his wife Anna Henrietta Rosenstock.
Theodor des Coudres was the son of Julius des Coudres and his wife Anna Henrietta Rosenstock.
At the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1887, he successfully finished his study with a thesis on the optical constants of mercury with Professor Hermann von Helmholtz.
In 1881 des Coudres began to study natural science and medicine at the University of Geneva and later in Leipzig and Munich. 1889 he was employed at the University of Leipzig as an assistant of Professor Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann. His research led him to his Habilitation in 1891.
1895 he was appointed to the University of Goettingen at the chair for "applied electricity".
In 1901 he went to the University of Würzburg and took over the chair for theoretical physics as an extraordinary professor In 1903 he became the successor of Professor Ludwig Boltzmann at the University of Leipzig, where he worked until the end of his life.
Sometimes he suffered from an enormous writer"s block and could handle this problem only during long trips by railway. Theodor des Coudres died at the age of 64 years on October 8, 1926 in Leipzig.
The publisher Georg Hirzel and the physicist Otto Wiener wrote noteworthy obituaries on Theodor des Coudres.
Des Coudres worked among other things on metal reflection, the Kerr effect, high pressure physics, and he was the first to determine the specific charge and the speed of alpha particles.
Saxonian Academy of Sciences.