840 FRIEDKICH KOHLRAUSCH, 



after a short service as Decent in the laboratory of the Physikalischer 

 Verein in Frankfurt, entered upon his academic career as professor 

 extraordinarius in 1866 in the same university. After four years of 

 service in Gottingen, he was appointed Ordinarius at Zurich in 1870. 

 The fear of annexation, widely curreat in Switzerland during the 

 Franco-Prussian war, aroused some bitterness even in academic 

 circles, and Kohlrausch never looked back upon his residence in 

 Zurich with pleasure. He returned to Germany (Darmstadt Pol}'- 

 technicum) the following year. It was in the University of Wiirzburg, 

 to which he was appointed in 1875 and where he remained for thirteen 

 years, that his most fruitful work, namely, that on the conductivity 

 of solutions, was begun. These studies of conductivity were continued 

 with occasional interruptions throughout his active career. 



In 1888, Kohlrausch was chosen to the professorship of physics in 

 Strassburg, and in 1894 he was invited to become the successor of 

 Kundt in the great University of Berlin. This latter position, to 

 occupy which was to be accredited the dean of the German university 

 physicists, Kohlrausch declined, partly for reasons of health and partly 

 because of the tremendous volume of administrative work required 

 of the occupant of this chair. But a few months elapsed, however, 

 before he was called again to Berlin, this time as President of the 

 Physikalisch-technische Reichsanstalt in succession to Helmholtz. 

 In this position Kohlrausch proved a veritable inspiration to the con- 

 siderable group of young men (of which the writer had the good 

 fortune to be one) which had been gathered together for research in 

 connection with the fundamental standards of physical measurement, 

 and it was during his administration that the Reichsanstalt took its 

 position at the head of institutions of its kind throughout the world. 

 The English National Physical Laboratory, established at Teddington 

 during this period, and the Bureau of Standards at Washington, were 

 modeled directly from the Reichsanstalt. 



The burden of this responsibility, however, proved to be too great 

 for health which had never been rugged, and he laid it down amid 

 universal regret and retired to private life in 1905. Even in his re- 

 tirement a considerable number of papers testified to the continued 

 fertility of this extraordinary brain, and at the time of his death in 

 1910 he had just completed the eleventh edition of his Lehrbuch der 

 praktischen Physik, a book which has proved indispensable to every 

 laboratory worker in physics during our time. 



Since Kohlrausch's death his papers have been gathered together 

 and published in two large volumes of " Gesammelte Abhandlungen," 



