Carl Theodor Albrecht was a German astronomer and geodesist. He is noted for his dedicated service as a director of the astronomy department of the Geodetic Institute and for his research on the problem of variation of latitude.
Background
Carl Theodor Albrecht was born on August 30, 1843, in Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony. Albrecht’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht, and both grandfathers were soap boilers. Indeed, his maternal grandfather, Christian Friedrich Pohle, was a senior official of the soap boilers’ guild of Dresden. Carl, however, did not continue the family tradition. His parents recognized the boy’s intelligence and set him on quite another path in that era when technology and the exact sciences flowered.
Education
As a student Albrecht's major fields were mathematics and the natural sciences, but he occupied himself independently with astronomy and meteorology. About 1865, after passing his examinations at the Polytechnicum in Dresden, which at that time was an engineering school, Albrecht studied astronomy at the University of Leipzig in order to follow his special inclinations and to enlarge his theoretical knowledge. In 1869 he graduated from Leipzig University with a degree in geodesy.
From 1866 on, Albrecht was an assistant in the central European degree measurement project while continuing his studies. After his graduation from Leipzig in 1869, he was immediately accepted at the newly founded Geodetic Institute in Potsdam, an indication that he already had a good scientific reputation. In 1873 he was appointed director of the astronomy department of the Geodetic Institute, a post he held until his death. In 1875 he became professor and specialized in geodesy, to which he devoted much of his career.
The Geodetic Institute quickly became one of the leading research institutes in astronomy and geodesy. From 1895 on, Albrecht also directed the International Latitude Service, a cooperative group of various research institutes in many countries that sought the precise determination of the geographic degree of latitude. He died on August 31, 1915 in Potsdam, Germany.