Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (1864-1928) became an assistant to Hermann v. Helmholtz at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin in 1890. It was there that he discovered the displacement law in 1893, and also published an equation for M s in 1896, that only slightly differed from Planck s law. Wien became Professor of Physics at the TH in Aachen in 1896, moved in 1899 to become a professor in Wurzburg, and once again changed to the University of Munich in 1920. In 1911 he was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics as an acknowledgement of his work on thermal radiation. 

Weights and Measures (Comptes Rendus, 1927). The scale was developed by the National Bureau of Standards in the United States in cooperation with the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt of Germany and the United Kingdom s National Physical Laboratory (Preston-Thomas, 1972). The scale was based on the freezing and boiling points of water, at 0 and 100°C, respectively, an interval of 100°C exactly, and on some fixed points outside this range. In the range of —190 to 660°C of that scale, the platinum resistance thermometer was specified as the interpolation instrument. 

Other PVT data for neon in the range of these tables are 64 observations made at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in 1925 and 1926 and 10 observations made by Michels and Gibson in 1928. The overall agreement with the P.T.R. points is good. The mean Q value is 0.218. The poor agreement of a few points must be attributed to both lack of fit and a systematic difference in the observed data. The fit of the 10 Michels points is also considered satisfactory because 6 of the points are in the extrapolated pressure portion of the tables and all of them are at ambient temperatures. 

Cahan, Meister] Cahan, David An Institute for an Empire. Die Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt 1871-1918, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 

Hermann Friedrich Wiebe studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, Aachen, Karlsruhe and at the University of Berlin. He worked at the Physikalisch-Techniscbe Reichsanstalt in Berlin. 

---