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Science & Medicine

Heinrich Gustav Magnus

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Who

Heinrich Gustav Magnus · Science & Medicine

What

Physicist and chemist; discovered the Magnus effect that explains the curve of a spinning ball, and trained a generation of German physicists in the first university physics laboratory

When

2 May 1802, Berlin, Prussia — 4 April 1870, Berlin, Prussia

Where

Germany

Biography

Heinrich Gustav Magnus is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Physicist and chemist; discovered the Magnus effect that explains the curve of a spinning ball, and trained a generation of German physicists in the first university physics laboratory

How & why

Heinrich Gustav Magnus was born in Berlin to a Jewish family of wealthy merchants. He showed in 1852 that a spinning cylinder or ball moving through a fluid is pushed sideways — the Magnus effect, which explains the curve of a struck ball and the behaviour of rotating bodies in flight. He also isolated the first platinum-ammine complex, Magnus's green salt, and ran in his own house the first physics teaching laboratory in a German university, from which Helmholtz, Clausius and Tyndall came.

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Source: Wikipedia — Heinrich Gustav Magnus

Contributions & Sources

Physicist and chemist; discovered the Magnus effect that explains the curve of a spinning ball, and trained a generation of German physicists in the first university physics laboratory

1852

Source: Wikipedia — Heinrich Gustav Magnus