WILHELM WEBER 269 



agreement can never take place withoiit a certain amount of 

 arbitrary decision. ^ 



It is a strange fact that in choosing names for the units, 

 the names of the originators of the whole system of units - 

 Gauss and Weber - were entirely unused, and surprise 

 was immediately expressed at the time.^ It is natural 

 that in Gauss and Weber's own country these objections 

 have been particularly emphasised, and have not yet been 

 silenced.^ 



Weber was extremely simple in his tastes, with a childlike 

 happiness of temperament and very contented by nature, 

 but yet in his way of thought immovably upright and of the 

 strongest character, and this now and then even allowed him 

 to exhibit a certain sharpness of temper, which he also 

 showed in public when he felt it to be necessary, although 

 he in general avoided such actions. His trust in human 

 nature easily led him much too far, and this was made use 



^ Helmholtz's was the principal representative of Germany at this 

 Congress; his influence was the greater because he showed great readi- 

 ness to meet the wishes of others present in Paris. Weber was invited to 

 the Congress, but his refusal was almost self-evident in view of his age 

 of seventy-seven. The Congress was reported in Nature, September 6th, 

 1883. 



2 See for example, B. Wiillner in his Lehrbuch der Physik, 4th Ed., 

 1886, vol. iv, p. 922, and Werner von Siemens, Lebenserinnerungen, 

 4th Ed., 1897, p. 281. The excuse was made for the omission of Weber's 

 name that a 'Weber's unit of current' was already in use, which was 

 ten times smaller than the one chosen by the Congress, and hence might 

 lead to confusion. This excuse does not hold water; for in the first place 

 the said smaller unit, though known in Germany as Weber's unit, was 

 nowhere in actual use (current measuring instruments with fixed gradua- 

 tions in units did not exist), and in the second place the larger unit 

 chosen by the Congress was actually in use under the name Weber in 

 England, where the technical employment of electric currents was at that 

 time further advanced. The fact that Weber still lived, whereas Ampfere, 

 whose name was used instead of Weber's, was already dead, has curi- 

 ously enough never been put forward as a reason, though at the 

 time it might have been, though unmentioned, one of the grounds 

 for the decision. 



3 A recent practice has been to use Weber instead of Ampere as a des- 

 cription of the current unit at will, which cannot produce any confusion. 

 Gauss has likewise been used for some time (without the decision of any 

 Congress) to designate the absolute unit of magnetic field strength. 



