28 Facts About Philipp Lenard

Philipp Lenard discovered that the energy of the electrons ejected from a cathode depends only on the frequency, and not the intensity, of the incident light.

Philipp Lenard was a nationalist and anti-Semite; as an active proponent of the Nazi ideology, he supported Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and was an important role model for the "" movement during the Nazi period.

Philipp Lenard was born in Pressburg, on 7 June 1862 in the Kingdom of Hungary.

The Philipp Lenard family had originally come from Tyrol in the 17th century, while his mother's family originated from Baden; both parents were German-speaking.

Philipp Lenard's father, Philipp von Lenard, was a wine-merchant in Pressburg.

The young Philipp Lenard studied at the Pozsonyi Kiralyi Katolikus Fogymnasium, and as he records in his autobiography, this made a big impression on him.

In 1882, Philipp Lenard left Budapest and returned to Pressburg, but in 1883, he moved to Heidelberg after his tender for an assistant's position in the University of Budapest was refused.

Philipp Lenard studied under Georg Hermann Quincke and he obtained a doctoral degree in 1886.

Philipp Lenard became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1905 and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1907.

Philipp Lenard overcame these problems by devising a method of making small metallic windows in the glass that were thick enough to be able to withstand the pressure differences, but thin enough to allow passage of the rays.

Philipp Lenard was able to conveniently detect the rays and measure their intensity by means of paper sheets coated with phosphorescent and materials.

Philipp Lenard observed that the absorption of cathode rays was, to first order, proportional to the density of the material they were made to pass through.

Philipp Lenard showed that the rays could pass through some inches of air of a normal density, and appeared to be scattered by it, implying that they must be particles that were even smaller than the molecules in air.

Philipp Lenard confirmed some of JJ Thomson's work, which eventually arrived at the understanding that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged energetic particles.

Philipp Lenard called them quanta of electricity or for short quanta, after Helmholtz, while Thomson proposed the name corpuscles, but eventually electrons became the everyday term.

Philipp Lenard proposed that every atom consists of empty space and electrically neutral corpuscules called "dynamids", each consisting of an electron and an equal positive charge.

Suspicious of the general adulation of Einstein, Philipp Lenard became a prominent skeptic of relativity and of Einstein's theories generally; he did not dispute Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect.

Philipp Lenard grew extremely resentful of the credit accorded to Wilhelm Rontgen, who received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901, for the discovery of the X-ray, despite the fact that Rontgen was German and a non-Jew.

Philipp Lenard wrote that he, not Roentgen, was the "mother of the X-rays", since he had invented the apparatus used to produce them.

Philipp Lenard likened Rontgen's role to that of a "midwife" who merely assists with the birth.

Philipp Lenard received the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of this work.

Philipp Lenard was the first person to study what has been termed the Philipp Lenard effect in 1892.

Philipp Lenard conducted studies on the size and shape distributions of raindrops and constructed a novel wind tunnel in which water droplets of various sizes could be held stationary for a few seconds.

Philipp Lenard was the first to recognize that large raindrops are not tear-shaped, but are rather shaped something like a hamburger bun.

Philipp Lenard is remembered today as a strong German nationalist who despised "English physics", which he considered to have stolen its ideas from Germany.

The individual scientists selected for inclusion by Philipp Lenard do not include Einstein or Marie Curie, nor any other twentieth-century scientist.

Philipp Lenard retired from Heidelberg University as professor of theoretical physics in 1931.

Philipp Lenard achieved emeritus status there, but he was expelled from his post by Allied occupation forces in 1945 when he was 83.