Georg Ohm was born in Erlangen, Germany on March 16th, 1789. His father, a master mechanical engineer, taught him basic practical skills. While still young, Ohm’s ambition was to become a scientist and to work at one of the great German Universities. He studied at the University of Erlangen, and at the age of 24, he began teaching Physics and Mathematics at the Realschule in Bamberg. He remained there for almost four years before becoming a professor of Mathematics for the Jesuit’s college at Cologne in 1817.
Ohm’s main interest was current
electricity, which had recently been advanced by Alessandro Volta’s invention
of the battery. Ohm made only a modest living and as a result his experimental
equipment was primitive. Despite this, he made his own metal wire, producing
a range of thicknesses and lengths of remarkable consistent quality. The nine
years he spent at the Jesuit’s college, he did considerable experimental research
on the nature of electric circuits. He took considerable pains to be brutally
accurate with every detail of his work.
In 1827, he was able to show from his experiments that there was a simple
relationship between resistance, current and voltage. Ohm’s law stated that
the amount of steady current through a material is directly proportional
to the voltage across the material, for some fixed temperature. This is mathematically
expressed as I=V/R. He had discovered the distribution of electromotive
force in an electrical circuit, and had established a definite relationship
connecting resistance, electromotive force and current strength. Ohm was
afraid that the purely experimental basis of his work would undermine the
importance of his discovery. He tried to state his law theoretically but
his rambling mathematically proofs made him an object of ridicule.
In the years that followed, Ohm lived in poverty, tutoring privately in
Berlin. He would receive no credit for his findings until he was made director
of the Polytechnic School of Nuremburg in 1833. In 1841, the Royal Society
in London recognized the significance of his discovery and awarded him the
Copley medal. The following year, they admitted him as a member. In 1849,
just 5 years before his death, Ohm’s lifelong dream was realized when he was
given a professorship of Experimental Physics at the University of Munich.
On July 7th,1854 he passed away in Munich, at the age of 65.
Ohm’s law
Ohm’s law is the mathematical relationship among electric current, resistance
and voltage. The principle is named after the German scientist Georg Simon
Ohm. Ohm demonstrated that there are no "perfect" electrical conductors
through a series of experiments in 1825. Every conductor he tested offered
some level of resistance. These experiments led to Ohm’s law. Ohm’s law
of 1826 states that if the given temperature remains constant, the current
flowing through certain conductors is proportional to the potential difference
(voltage) across it. In other words, current equals voltage divided by resistance.
Ohm’s family
Georg Simon Ohm came from a protestant family. His father, Johann Wolfgang
Ohm was a locksmith while his mother, Maria Elizabeth Beck, was the daughter
of a tailor. They had seven children and only three survived, Georg, his
brother Martin who went on to become a well-known mathematician, and his
sister Elizabeth.
Ohm’s most important discovery
Ohm’s most important discovery was in 1826 when he discovered the mathematical
law of electric current called "Ohm’s Law"
Some facts about Ohm
Georg Ohm has a crater on the moon named after him.
Ohm experimented with optics, acoustics, and the electrical conductivity
of liquids, though he didn’t achieve any real progress in these fields.
For information on the history
of the battery, see the following site!
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbattery.htm
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