Max Karl Werner Wien (; 25 December 1866 – 22 February 1938) was a German

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and the director of the Institute of Physics at the

University of Jena The University of Jena, officially the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (, abbreviated FSU, shortened form ''Uni Jena''), is a public research university located in Jena, Thuringia, Germany. The university was established in 1558 and is cou ...

. He was born in

Königsberg Königsberg (; ; ; ; ; ; , ) is the historic Germany, German and Prussian name of the city now called Kaliningrad, Russia. The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the small Old Prussians, Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teuton ...

Prussia Prussia (; ; Old Prussian: ''Prūsija'') was a Germans, German state centred on the North European Plain that originated from the 1525 secularization of the Prussia (region), Prussian part of the State of the Teutonic Order. For centuries, ...

(now Kaliningrad, Russia), the son of the co-owner of the well-known Castell grain company, Otto Wien. Wien, Max. Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen für Wissenschaft und Forschun

(in German). He was a cousin of

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes (, ) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in th ...

Wilhelm Wien Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (; 13 January 1864 – 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any te ...

. Wien studied in Konigsberg, Freiburg, and Berlin under

Hermann von Helmholtz Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (; ; 31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894; "von" since 1883) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The ...

and

August Kundt August Adolf Eduard Eberhard Kundt (; 18 November 1839 – 21 May 1894) was a German physicist known for developing Kundt's tube, an appartus used to measure the speed of sound in gases and solids. Early life Kundt was born in Schwerin, Meckle ...

, receiving his PhD under Helmholtz in 1888.Karl Willy Wagner, "Max Wien zum 70. Geburtstag",

Naturwissenschaften ''The Science of Nature'', formerly ''Naturwissenschaften'', is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media covering all aspects of the natural sciences relating to questions of biological significance. I ...

, Volume 25, Number 5, 65-67,
(link to pdf)
(in German). In 1892 he worked with

Wilhelm Röntgen Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (; 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923), sometimes Transliteration, transliterated as Roentgen ( ), was a German physicist who produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays. As ...

Würzburg Würzburg (; Main-Franconian: ) is, after Nuremberg and Fürth, the Franconia#Towns and cities, third-largest city in Franconia located in the north of Bavaria. Würzburg is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. It sp ...

, where in 1893 he received the ''

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

'', qualifying him to be a professor. He moved to the Technical High School of Aachen in 1898 where he became Extraordinary Professor in 1899. In 1904 he became full Professor at the Technical High School of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). From 1911 to 1935 he was Professor at

, in

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 in ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, where he died in 1938. Wien's scientific research were in the areas of high frequency electronics, acoustics, and electrolyte conductance. He is known for the invention of the

Wien bridge The Wien bridge is a type of bridge circuit that was developed by Max Wien in 1891. The bridge consists of four resistors and two capacitors. At the time of the Wien bridge's invention, bridge circuits were a common way of measuring component v ...

in 1891, a type of AC measurement circuit similar to the

Wheatstone bridge A Wheatstone bridge is an electrical circuit used to measure an unknown electrical resistance by balancing two legs of a bridge circuit, one leg of which includes the unknown component. The primary benefit of the circuit is its ability to prov ...

which was used to measure the impedance of capacitors and inductors. From 1906 to 1909 he did research into the efficiency of early radio transmitters, called

spark gap transmitter A spark-gap transmitter is an obsolete type of radio transmitter which generates radio waves by means of an electric spark."Radio Transmitters, Early" in Spark-gap transmitters were the first type of radio transmitter, and were the main type use ...

s, which used an

electric spark An electric spark is an abrupt electrical discharge that occurs when a sufficiently high electric field creates an Ionization, ionized, Electric current, electrically conductive channel through a normally-insulating medium, often air or other ga ...

to generate radio waves. In existing transmitters the spark damped the oscillation in the

tuned circuit An LC circuit, also called a resonant circuit, tank circuit, or tuned circuit, is an electric circuit consisting of an inductor, represented by the letter L, and a capacitor, represented by the letter C, connected together. The circuit can act ...

, creating highly damped waves, in which the radio energy was spread over a wide bandwidth, limiting their range. In 1906 Wien invented a new type of spark gap, called a "quenched gap", that extinguished the spark immediately after energy had been transferred to the tuned circuit. This transmitter, developed by the German firm Telefunken, produced very lightly damped waves, which had a narrower bandwidth and thus greater range, and also produced an easy to identify musical tone in the receiver headphones. Wien "singing spark" or quenched-spark transmitters ("Löschfunkensender") were widely used until the end of the spark era around 1920. At Jena he studied the conductance of

electrolyte An electrolyte is a substance that conducts electricity through the movement of ions, but not through the movement of electrons. This includes most soluble Salt (chemistry), salts, acids, and Base (chemistry), bases, dissolved in a polar solven ...

solutions at high fields and high frequencies, discovering what is now called Wien effect. The Wien bridge oscillator is so named because it uses a Wien bridge as a feedback network, but it was not invented by Wien. William Hewlett, co-founder of

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

, was the first to use a Wien bridge as a feedback network around a vacuum tube amplifier to create an oscillator in 1939.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wien, Max 1866 births 1938 deaths Scientists from Königsberg Scientists from the Province of Prussia 20th-century German physicists 19th-century German inventors 19th-century German physicists Academic staff of the University of Jena