Maximilien August Topler (25 June 1870 – 14 March 1960) was a German physicist known for his work on

electrostatics Electrostatics is a branch of physics that studies electric charges at rest (static electricity). Since classical times, it has been known that some materials, such as amber, attract lightweight particles after rubbing. The Greek word for amber ...

, sparks and

Schlieren photography Schlieren photography is a process for photographing fluid flow. Invented by the German physicist August Toepler in 1864 to study supersonic motion, it is widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects. C ...

. His father was the physicist

August Toepler August Joseph Ignaz Toepler (7 September 1836 – 6 March 1912) was a German chemist and physicist known for his experiments in electrostatics. Biography August Toepler was born on 7 September 1836. He studied chemistry at the Gewerbe-Insti ...

. Toepler's law (1906) states that the resistance of an electric arc at any time is inversely proportional to the charge which has flowed through the arc: :

R(t)=

where ''I(t)'' is the current in the arc discharge at time ''t'', and ''D'' is the gap between the electrodes. The parameter

k_T

is a constant whose value is

4 \times 10^ \, V \cdot s \cdot m^

References

Toepler's law (PDF)

High Voltage Engineering Fundamentals
* Toepler, ''Annalen der Physik'', 1906; 4: 191. (original publication) {{DEFAULTSORT:Toepler, Maximilien 1870 births 1960 deaths 20th-century German physicists