Hermann von Helmholtz is arguably the most famous German scientist of the 19th century. He was born in 1821 in Potsdam, Germany, to Caroline and August Helmholtz. His father, a teacher as well as an officer in the Prussian army, began schooling young Hermann at home because of health problems.

He did attend Gymnasium from the ages of nine to 17. He wanted to study physics, but entered medical school in Berlin in 1838. His parents could not afford to send him without the scholarship given to medical students who promised to serve in the army after graduating.

Helmholtz befriended several other young men who were students of Johannes Müller at the nearby University of Berlin. Of these friends, Emil Du Bois-Reymond went on to discover the action potential, while another, Ernst Brücke, would have a certain Sigmund Freud as a research assistant. These students of Müller, in contrast to their professor, swore a solemn oath to avoid vitalism, the belief that there was something unique about living, as opposed to non-living, matter: “No other forces than common physical chemical ones are active within the organism.” Helmholtz adopted their position as well.

In 1842, he became an army surgeon at Potsdam, and continued studying math and physics on his own. In 1847, he read a paper at the Physical Society of Berlin on the conservation of energy. This alone would have won him an honored place in history!

Soon after, he became an associate professor of physiology at Königsberg, and married. During this period of his life, he measured the speed of the neural impulse. Prior, it was thought to be either infinite or the speed of light. He found it to be a paltry 90 feet per second. This put neurological activity well within the limits of ordinary physical and chemical sciences!

Along the way, in 1851, he invented the ophthalmoscope -- the device doctors use to look into your eye.

In 1855, he moved to Bonn to be professor of anatomy and physiology. Here he began his research into sight and hearing. In 1856, he published the first of three volumes called the Handbook of Physiological Optics.

He moved once again in 1858, this time to Heidelberg as professor of physiology. During this period, his wife died, and he later married a young socialite. His philosophical work focused on epistemology, and he continued his research on sight and hearing. His explanation of color vision -- that it is based on three cones sensitive to red, green, and violet -- is still remembered as the Young-Helmholtz theory. He became quite famous.

In 1870, he was offered the chair in physics (his first love) at the University of Berlin. In addition to a huge salary, he was offered living quarters and a new Institute of Physics.

He published a number of papers on geometry, especially the non-Euclidean kind that would be so important to people like Einstein in the twentieth century. His main focus was physics, of course, and one of his prize students was Heinrich Hertz, who was the first person to actually generate radio waves in 1888.

Helmholtz traveled to the US in 1893 as the German representative to the Chicago World's Fair. A bad fall on ship put his health in serious jeopardy. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in September of 1894.

© Copyright 2000 and 2002, C. George Boeree