German physicist Philipp Lenard (1862 - 1947) won the 1905 Nobel Prize for his research into the properties of cathode rays. His reputation was later tarnished, however, thanks to his support of Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party and its racial - superiority theories. In the 1920s, Lenard broke with the international scientific community over Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. From his post as professor of physics at the esteemed University of Heidelberg, he derided Einstein's breakthrough as spurious "Jewish science."
Disliked Wine Business
The future Nobel winner was born Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard on June 7, 1862, in Pressburg, the Slovakian city that later became Bratislava. His family was of Austrian heritage, from the Tyrol, and lived comfortably from the income of his father's business as a wine merchant. It was hoped that Lenard, too, would enter into the wine trade and someday take over the family business, but he favored the science experiment over the business deal. He took some courses in Pressburg and also at the technical university in Budapest, Hungary, and then agreed to work for his father for a year. Afterward, he traveled through Germany, and at one point attended a series of lectures given by Robert Bunsen, the German chemist after whom the ubiquitous chemistry - lab gas burner is named. The lectures sparked Lenard's determination to pursue a scientific career in earnest.
Lenard studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, earning his doctorate with high honors in 1886 from the former. He remained in the city for the next three years, taking a position as assistant to his professor, Georg Quincke, but was able to conduct his own research experiments. As a youngster, he had been fascinated by the way fluorine crystals began to glow when heated. His earliest projects concluded that such phosphorescence was a result of impurities in the material. Calcium sulphide, for example, was thought to be self - luminous, but Lenard's work showed that traces of heavy metals, such as copper and bismuth, formed crystals that caused the substance to glow.
Worked with Heinrich Hertz
From Heidelberg, Lenard went to England in 1890 for a job at the electromagnetic and engineering laboratories of the City and Guilds of the London Central Institution. He remained there less than a year, however, and came away with a lifelong disdain for the country and even its scientific community. Over the next decade, Lenard switched jobs several times, taking posts at the universities of Breslau, Bonn, and Heidelberg, and at the technical college of Aachen. It was during this period that he made the significant advances in cathode ray research, which had progressed out of his work in phosphorescence. Discovered in 1879, cathode rays were essentially light beams of charged particles produced as a result of the discharge of electricity in vacuum tubes. Scientists were eager to find a way to study their properties outside of the vacuum tubes.
Some of Lenard's work was done under the auspices of Heinrich Hertz at the University of Bonn, to whom he served as an assistant. The scientific designation for frequency (Hz), used commonly in radio communication, is named in Hertz's honor. One day in 1892, according to the official Nobel Prize Website, "Hertz called him to see the discovery he had made that a piece of uranium glass covered with aluminum foil and put inside the discharge tube became luminous beneath the aluminum foil when the cathode rays struck it." Hertz conceived an experiment whereby the two spaces could be separated via a thin aluminum plate, "one in which the cathode rays were produced in the ordinary way and the other in which one could observe them in a pure state, which had never been done. Hertz was too busy to do this and gave Lenard permission to do it and it was then that he made the great discovery of the 'Lenard window,' " the Nobel Prize essay noted.
The cathode - ray work led Lenard to theorize about matter, the basic element of the physical world, and the atoms of which it consists. He concluded that the atom contains neutral pairs of what he called dynamids, one positively charged and the other negatively charged. He was not entirely correct, but it would be another decade before a nuclear model of the atom would be correctly assembled by Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand - born Nobel Prize winner who made several notable scientific advances while at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester in England. Rutherford was the 1908 winner in chemistry, while Lenard was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in physics for his cathode ray work.
Theorized about Atoms
Lenard's other significant contribution to science involved the photoelectric effect, or what happens when a beam of light strikes a metal plate. Electrons are emitted from the plate, and Lenard found that their intensity was dependent on the brightness of the incident light. He also found that the speed of the electrons remained unchanged. Explaining why this occurred, however, was beyond the grasp of science at the time, and could not be proved by correlating experiments using the current laws of physics. Only in 1905, when Albert Einstein published a paper that discussed what he termed "light quanta," or photons, could the photoelectric effect be accurately explained by science.
After several years as a professor at the University of Kiel, Lenard was offered a professorship at his alma mater, the University of Heidelberg, in 1907. He remained there for the rest of his career, and proved a popular, enthusiastic teacher and mentor to a generation of students. He also became head of the physics institute at the esteemed university. He was said to have been disappointed that Einstein did not acknowledge his contributions to the study of the photoelectric effect, especially when Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. A German Jew who was by then serving as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, Einstein was widely hailed as a genius and the theorist who single - handedly pushed modern science into a new and exciting future. In an unpublished autobiography, Lenard later dismissed Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity, calling it "a Jewish fraud, which one could have suspected from the first with more racial knowledge than was then disseminated, since its originator Einstein was a Jew," he declared, according to Alan D. Beyerchen's Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich.
Lenard was not alone in the scientific community with his objections to Einstein's work. The charge was initially led by the Work Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship, which even held a few anti - Einstein rallies in 1920. These activities prompted Einstein to respond in the press, and he attacked Lenard in one of his letters published in a German newspaper. Over the next few years, Lenard personally campaigned against Einstein's theories in various scientific papers, at conferences of German physicists, and in the press. Originally, he questioned only the methods used by Einstein and other theoretical physicists, but the attacks took on a shriller, anti - Semitic tone.
Suffered Several Personal Setbacks
This shift occurred around the same time that Lenard's son, Werner - from his 1897 marriage to Katherine Schlehner - died from the aftereffects of malnutrition in February of 1922. Several years earlier, during World War I, England had blockaded Germany, cutting off food supplies, and it was the youngest Germans who suffered most. Werner never fully recovered, and had been Lenard's only son. The tragedy likely further fueled the frustration he felt and injustices perceived. A conservative in outlook, Lenard was by then middle - aged and like many of his contemporaries, felt adrift with the end of imperial Germany after World War I. Economic difficulties compounded his attitude. The newly installed constitutional democracy, commonly called the Weimar government after the city where the constitution was drafted, had a difficult time managing the country's dire economic predicament, and inflation skyrocketed. After the war, Lenard had exchanged his savings for government bonds, which became worthless; he and other Germans worried that the money had actually been stolen by the Weimar government, which had some prominent Jewish politicians amongst its leaders.
The assassination of Germany's Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, in June of 1922 instigated a professional crisis for Lenard. Rathenau was a wealthy Jewish industrialist before he served in the Weimar government, and heir to the AEG electric fortune. Right - wing extremists in Germany accused him of using his post to secretly collude with the Soviets in what was deemed a "Jewish - Communist conspiracy." A day of mourning was declared on the day of Rathenau's funeral, but Lenard refused to close his physics institute at the University of Heidelberg or fly its flag at half - mast. Protesters gathered outside, stormed the building after water was dumped on them from above, and marched Lenard by force to the local union hall, where city authorities took him into custody for a few hours for his own protection. The University's academic senate suspended him, but students loyal to him protested and he was exonerated.
Praised Hitler in Newspaper Articles
The incident served to crystallize Lenard's belief that his country was becoming clearly divided by ideology, and he wholeheartedly threw his support to conservative side - the emerging Nazi Party, which called for the removal of Jews from German political, social, and cultural institutions. When Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler began serving a jail sentence in April of 1924 for a failed coup in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch, Lenard penned an article for a Bavarian newspaper, Grossdeutsche Zeitung, commending Hitler. He asserted that the Nazis "appear to us as gifts of God from a long darkened earlier time when races were still purer, persons still greater, spirits still less fraudulent."
It is known that Hitler and his deputy, Rudolf Hess, later paid a visit to Lenard at his Heidelberg home in 1928. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Lenard wrote him and offered his services as scientific advisor to the new Reich. In the letter, he suggested that the esteemed German university system was unduly riddled with Jewish influence. By then he had retired from the University of Heidelberg, and in 1935 its physics institute was renamed in his honor in 1935. He was the recipient of several other official honors, including the Eagle Shield of the Reich, but his actual role in guiding Nazi policy during the 1933 - 45 era was negligible. At World War II's end and the defeat of Hitler, Allied authorities discussed subjecting him to a denazification trial, but a rector at the university intervened. Lenard was in his early eighties by then, and spent the remaining years of his life in a nearby town called Messelhausen, where he died on May 20, 1947.
The cathode - ray research Lenard conducted early in his career helped pave the way for the cathode ray tube, or CRT, which was the essential element in the development of television. The CRT was standard in the television manufacturing industry for nearly 50 years after Lenard's death, until it was replaced by liquid - crystal display technology. In the end, however, Lenard's scientific legacy was tarnished by his support for "Aryan physics" and "German science," which rejected foreign influence on German research and progress. He dismissed the standard notion that science is an international activity where nationalism has no place. In the 1936 textbook he wrote, Deutsche Physik (German Physics), he asserted instead that "science, like everything man produces, is racially determined, determined by blood."
Books
Beyerchen, Alan D. Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich, Yale University Press, 1977.
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 2 vols., Macmillan Reference USA, 1995.
Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present, edited by Brigham Narins, Gale, 2001.
Periodicals
Sunday Times (London, England), January 25, 1998.
Times (London, England), February 4, 1936.
Online
"Philipp Lenard - Biography," Nobelprize.org, http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1905/lenard - bio.html (December 19, 2004).
