HELMHOLTZ

…"By 1866 Helmholtz had completed his great treatises on sensory physiology and was contemplating abandoning physiology for physics. The scope of physiology had already become too great for any individual to encompass, he wrote in 1868, and while a flourishing school of physiology existed in Germany, German physics was stagnating for lack of well-trained young recruits. When Gustav Magnus’ death in 1870 left vacant the prestigious chair of physics at Berlin, Helrnholtz and G. R. Kirchhoff, his colleague at Heidelberg, became the primary candidates for the post. The Berlin philosophical faculty preferred Kirchhoff, whom they regarded as the superior teacher.

When he refused the post, the nomination went to Helmholtz.. Helmholtz’ price was high: 4,000 taler yearly plus the construction of a new physics institute to be under his full control. Prussia readily agreed to his terms, for it was widely recognized that his call possessed great political as well as scientific significance in Prussia’s bid for leadership of southern Germany. He accepted the Berlin post early in 1871.

Helmholtz inaugurated his new position with a series of papers critically assessing the various competing theories of electrodynamic action. This work first brought Maxwell's field theory to the attention of Continental physicists and inspired the later research of Helmholtz' pupil Heinrich Hertz, who entered the Berlin institute in 1878. After 1876 Helmhotz contributed papers on the galvanic celI, the thermodynamics of chemical processes, and meteorology. He devoted the last decade before his death in 1894 to an unsuccessful attempt at founding not only mechanics but all of physics on a single universal principie, that of least action

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By 1885 Helrnholtz had become the patriarch of German science and the state's foremost adviser on scientific affairs. This position was recognized in 1887, when Helmholtz assumed the presidency of the newly founded Physikalisch-technische Reichsanstalt for research in the exact sciences and precision technology. Helmhotz' friend, the industrialist Werner von Siemens, had donated 500,000 marks to the project, and he himself had been among its foremost advocates. Under his administration the Reichsanstalt stressed purely scientific rescarch.

Although Helmholtz' productivity did not wane, his health began to fail after 1885. He had always suffered from migraine, from which he sought relief in music and mountaineering in the Alps. In old age he began to experience fits of depression which only long vacations could cure. On 12 July 1894 he suffered what appeared to be a paralytic stroke, and he died on 8 September…"