Winfried Otto Schumann

Winfried Otto Schumann (May 20, 1888–September 22, 1974) was a German physicist who predicted the Schumann resonance, a series of low-frequency resonances caused by lightning discharges in the atmosphere.

Biography

Winfried Schumann was born in Tübingen, Germany. His early years were spent in Kassel and in Berndorf, a town near Vienna. He majored in electrical engineering at the Technical College in Karlsruhe. In 1912 he gained a doctorate with high-current technology as his thesis.

Prior to the First World War, he managed the high voltage laboratory at Brown, Boveri & Cie.

During 1920, he was made a professor at the Technical University in Stuttgart, where he had previously been employed as a research assistant. He subsequently took a position as professor of physics at the University of Jena. In 1924, he was made professor and director of the Electrophysical Laboratory at the Technical University of Munich. The laboratory subsequently became the Electrophysical Institute, where Schumann continued working until retiring from active research in 1961 at the age of 73, though he continued teaching for a further two years.

Schumann was 86 years old when he died on September 22, 1974.

Patents

*, Tube control, Winfried Otto Schumann, Sep 29, 1942

External links

* [http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/papers/schlegel_schumann.pdf 50 Years of Schumann Resonance, Kristian Schlegel and Martin Füllekrug]
* [http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4249v2 Examples of the Zeroth Theorem of the History of Science]