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Wilhelm Wien (1864–1928)

1911 Physics

For his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat.

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien was the son of a rural landowner in Fischhausen, East Prussia, and seemed likely to follow in his father’s footsteps until an economic crisis forced the family to uproot their lives. They moved to Drachstein in 1866, where the young Wilhelm attended school for the first time. Not long afterward, he transferred to The City School at Heidelberg. As Wien’s fascination with science grew, so did his ambitions of studying at university.

In 1882 he entered the University of Göttingen and the University of Berlin to study mathematics and the natural sciences. Between 1883 and 1885 he worked in the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz, a noted German physicist, while continuing his studies. A year later, in 1886, Wien presented his thesis on experiments on the diffraction of light on sections of metal and the influence of materials on the color of refracted light and received his doctorate.

When his father became ill, however, Wien was obliged to return home to help run the household. Despite this professional setback, he did not break his ties with the scientific world and managed to spend some time experimenting with Helmholtz. After a number of years the family estate was sold, allowing Wien to return to Helmholtz’s laboratory.

Wien served as a professor of physics in Aix-la-Chapelle in 1896, and there he met Luise Mehler. The couple married in 1898 and had four children together.

Wien’s scientific work during his life did not offer solutions to all the questions that science asked at the time, but his contributions were undeniable. In 1893 he proved that the length of a radioactive wave emitted by a black body varies with temperature and demonstrated the rule that would become known as the law of displacement. It was for this research into thermal radiation that he was eventually awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The prestige of this award soon allowed him to become a member of the science academies of Berlin, Göttingen, Vienna, Stockholm, Christiania and Washington and an honorary member of the Physical Society of Frankfurt. Wien also lectured in many cities, finally moving to Munich in 1920, where he stayed with his family until his death eight years later. Wien’s autobiography was posthumously published in 1930 and entitled Aus dem Leben und Wirken eines Physikers (The Life and Work of a Physicist), demonstrating how closely he identified himself with his occupation.