Gustav Magnus – ein Chemiker prägt die Berliner Physik

“Gustav Magnus—A Chemist Who Shaped Physics in Berlin” by Stefan L. Wolff (German language).—This essay traces Gustav Magnus’s path from a scientist trained in chemistry to the defining figure in physics in Berlin. Beginning with his origins in a Jewish mercantile and banking milieu, his family’s conversion, and his father’s chemical manufacturing ventures in Sacrow, Stefan L. Wolff reconstructs the interplay of social background, education, and scientific career. Magnus studied in Berlin, worked with Jöns Jacob Berzelius in Stockholm, and initially devoted himself to chemistry and technology before the demands of apparatus-based technical instruction and physics lectures encouraged his move into experimental physics. With his house on Kupfergraben, his own lecture hall, laboratory, physics apparatus collection, and the physics colloquium he launched in 1843, he transferred the laboratory culture of chemistry to physics in Berlin; from this emerged important structures for research and teaching, extending to the Physical Society of Berlin and the private physics laboratory of 1863. At the same time, the essay offers a nuanced account of Magnus’s research on the theory of heat, gases, thermoelectricity, and thermal radiation, correcting the image of an anti-theoretical empiricist: Magnus opposed speculative Naturphilosophie, not mathematical theory, provided it remained experimentally grounded. Magnus thus emerges as a key figure in the institutionalization and increasing disciplinary differentiation of physics at the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century.