Hermann von Helmholtz: biography of this German physician and physicist

This was the life of Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the leading scientists of the 19th century.

Hermann von Helmholtz is one of the most important researchers in the history of modern science. Renowned in his native Germany and famous throughout the world, this scientist contributed enormously to all kinds of fields of knowledge.

Physiology, mechanics, chemistry, physics and even psychology were all disciplines to which von Helmholtz contributed in one way or another. In fact, it is thanks to his mentoring and inspiring Wilhelm Wundt that the first empirical laboratory of psychology was developed.

In the following we will discover the life of this researcher. we will discover the life of this researcher through a biography of Hermann von Helmholtz, the people he influenced, his work, the people he influenced, and the people who were influenced by him.The following is a biography of Hermann von Helmholtz, the people he influenced, his main contributions and works, and the honors he received.

Short biography of Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz was a historical figure of the nineteenth century, and like the vast majority of the thinkers of his time was not dedicated to only one profession, but to several. He was a German physician and physicist, but with his contributions he can also be considered a physicist, chemist, neurologist, experimenter in the psychology of perception and philosopher, all of them professions that at first glance are not very common.all of them professions that at first glance may not seem to fit very well, but that certainly had an important scientific basis thanks to the genius and work of this German.

In physiology and psychology he is known for his work on the functioning and perception of the human eye and ear. He contributed in physics with his theory on the conservation of energy, his work on electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics and the mechanical basis of thermodynamics. As for his contribution to philosophy, his way of defending a more empirical and materialistic way of thinking is well known. He was also the inventor of devices such as the ophthalmoscope, the ophthalmometer and various devices with which he analyzed sounds.

Early years

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was born in Potsdam, Prussia (now Germany) on August 31, 1821.. He was the eldest of four siblings but, due to his delicate state of health, he remained confined to his home until he was seven years old. His father, Ferdinand Helmholtz was a professor of philosophy at the Gymnasium in Potsdam and a close friend of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, while his mother was a descendant of William Penn, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania.

It is said that from his mother he inherited calmness and perseverance, qualities that accompanied him throughout his life as a scientist, while from his father he received an important cultural heritage, being this man who trained him in classical languages, French, English and Italian, in addition to introducing him to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Fichte.

Training as a physician

His father would motivate him to study medicine, which he began as soon as he finished high school.. He attended the Berlin Medical School (Frederick Wilhelm Medical-Surgical Institute), popularly known as the Berlin Pépinière. The reason he went there was that he did not have to pay tuition, which was important since his family was not very wealthy. In order to study there, the young Helmholtz committed himself to serve eight years in the army. There he would choose to train in physiology, being a pupil of Johannes Peter Müller.

Four years later, the young Helmholtz would leave the Pépinière as a doctor of anatomy for an internship at the Charité in Berlin. In 1841 he began his doctoral thesis under the direction of Müller, which was a study of the structure of the nervous system in invertebrates.. During the preparation of this thesis he discovered that nerve fibers arise from cells that had been previously identified by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg.

Military medicine and physiological research

In 1843 he was assigned to the hospital in his native Potsdam where he would work until 1848, working as a military doctor. In addition to working as a physician, he was able to conduct research on his own because he had plenty of free time. In fact, he was able to arrange for a barracks to be converted into his laboratory. That modest place would be the scene of several investigations, among them those on the production of heat during muscular contraction.

His research showed that heat was not transported by the Blood or nerves, but was produced by the muscles themselves.. Thus he deduced a mechanical equivalent of heat, finding the exact formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy, incorporating it in his 1847 dissertation "Über die Erhaltung der Kraft" (On the conservation of energy).

With this work he suggested that there were no "vital forces" that moved the muscles and rejected the speculative tradition of natural philosophy, the majority current in German physiology at the time. Thanks to this work, Helmholtz is considered to be one of the great founders of the principle one of the great founders of the principle of the conservation of energy.He was among the most outstanding physicists of the 19th century, among them Julius von Mayer, James Prescott Joule and William Thomsom, Lord Kelvin.

Teaching years and the end of his life

After all this he was able to leave the army and begin teaching anatomy at the Prussian Academy of Arts, thanks in part to the help provided by Alexander von Humboldt. He would later obtain a chair of physiology in Königsberg (1849) and then in Bonn (1955) and Heidelberg.

In 1871 he was appointed to the chair of physics and director of the Institute at the University of Berlin and, in 1888, he assumed the post of president of the Physico-Technical Institute in Charlottenburg. At this time he studied wave phenomena, the laws on the vertiginous motion of fluids and investigations on the wave motion of fluids.. He died a few years later, on September 8, 1894, at the age of 73.

During the last years of his life, great scientists and minds of the intellectual panorama of the 19th century passed through his classes, among them Max Planck, Heinrich Kayser, Wilhelm Wien, Eugen Goldstein, Arthut König, Wilheml Wundt, Henry Augustus Rowland, Albert A. Michelson, Fernando Sanford and Michael I. Pupin.

Works and theoretical-practical contributions

His first major research work was his doctoral thesis "Über die Erhaltung der Kraft" (1847) in which he set forth the exact formulation of the principle of the conservation of energywhich had already been discovered by Julius von Mayer but presented with little scientific rigor. This paper, which was read before the Berlin Physical Society, was the one that placed Helmholtz among the great physicists of the time. Moreover, he himself had the merit of extending this principle to electrical and magnetic phenomena.

Later on, he would devote himself to physiology. He studied some physico-physiological points and established a theory of sensations.. He achieved notable fame especially his "Manual of physiological optics", his "Investigations on sound sensations" and "Physiological theory of music", all of them investigations and treatises appeared during the period of 1863 and 1867.

His studies on sensory physiology would be the basis of Wilhelm Wundt's work, being a student of Helmholt himself.Wundt, a student of Helmholtz himself and who would end up founding the first laboratory of experimental psychology. In fact, Wundt describes Helmholtz's method as that of a sort of empirical philosophy in which the mind was studied as an independent element. Helmholtz had rejected natural philosophy and emphasized the importance of materialism.

In 1849, while in Königsberg, Helmholtz measured the speed of nerve impulse transmission. measured the speed of nerve impulse transmission.. At that time it was already suspected that nerve signals traveled along the nerves at enormous speed, but it was not known how fast. In order to prove this, he used a frog's sciatic nerve and the muscle of one of its legs. By means of a galvanometer and a method that incorporated the use of a mirror to reflect light into the room so that the apparatus could detect it, he was able to check the speed of the impulse: 24.6-38.4 meters per second.

Physiological studies

The "Manual of Physiological Optics" was published in three parts in 1856, 1860 and 1866. It includes many investigations carried out by the author that were important contributions to contemporary knowledge about the eye, psychological optics, ocular dioptrics and visual sensations and perceptions, belonging to the field of psychology and for which Helmholtz is highly esteemed within the sciences of behavior and perception. It is also in his manual that he describes the ophthalmometer and the ophthalmoscope, two instruments that he himself had manufactured.

The treatise "Investigations on Sound Sensations" of 1863 was the founding document in the history of acoustics as a science.. In it the author wondered about the essence of sound sensation and discovered that it was due to periodic movements of the air. He also investigated what differentiated musical tones from each other and established the existence of three characteristics: intensity, pitch and timbre.

In relation to timbre, Herlmholtz admits that this is due to the existence of "higher partial tones", a phenomenon we know today as harmonics, which are superimposed on the fundamental tones. The number and intensity of the harmonics is what characterizes the timbre of a sound. To investigate the timbre of the vowels, he built resonators consisting of hollow spheres of different diameters, each of which entered into different vibrations by resonance when a sound of a period equal to its own was produced near them.

In this work he also he spoke about the beats, which he studied experimentally by means of a polyphonic siren made by himself and established that when the number of beats for two single tones was less than a certain number, dissonance was obtained, as a general rule. By means of these investigations Herlmholtz arrived at an explanation of harmony whereby in music the most pleasing effects were provided by the simplest relations between vibrations, an explanation which answered one of the most discussed questions since the time of Pythagoras.

In his "Physiological Theory of Music" (1863) he expounded a whole homogeneous and well-ordered body on the notions and facts discovered by illustrious musicians, physicists and physiologists about the art of the muses, modifying and explaining them in mathematical and mechanical terms. The main theme of this work is that of resonance in physical and physiological terms.

Studies in mechanics and other works

In the more purely physical field he dealt with wave phenomena and, in 1858, he had already formulated mathematically the laws on the vertiginous motion of fluids, thus initiating a new chapter in mechanics.

In analytical mechanics, he applied to electrodynamics the principle of minimum action, which would later lead him to the formulation of a new theory of electromagnetism, more complete than the one proposed by James Maxwell. In 1881, studying the electrolytic effects of current, he intuited a concept as modern as quanta.. He would apply the principle of conservation of energy to chemical processes, advancing physical chemistry and thermodynamics.

In addition to the works we have discussed, it is worth mentioning the "Lectures on Popular Science" (1865-1870), "Counting and Measuring" (1887) and the "Collections of Scientific Dissertations" (1882-1895). His university lectures in physics appeared posthumously in five volumes between 1897 and 1898 under the title "Lectures on Theoretical Physics".

Helmholtz's honors and legacy

Helmholtz's work and contributions were so important that both during his lifetime and posthumously he was awarded numerous honors internationally. In 1881 he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland and in the same year he was awarded the French Legion of Honor. In 1884 he was awarded honorary membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders of Scotland.

In 1883 he was honored by the Emperor of Prussia by giving him a title of nobility, stylizing his surname with the "von" in front which, although it did not involve gaining land, implied receiving a title of respect within German society and was hereditary in nature, giving him a certain social cachet. Sin embargo, el mayor honor a su tarea científica es sin lugar a dudas el haberse bautizado con su nombre la mayor asociación de instituciones científicas en Alemania: la Asociación Helmholtz.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• Cahan, D. (1993). Hermann Von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science. University of California Press. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-520-08334-9.
• Patton, L., (2009), Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori: from Helmholtz to Wittgenstein, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 40 (3): 281–289.
• Turner, R. S. (2014) In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy, Princeton University Press, p. 36.