Wilhelm Wien

On this date in 1864, Nobel laureate Wilhelm Wien was born in Gaffken near Fischhausen, Province of Prussia (now Primorsk, Russia). The primary area Wien worked in was the radiation of heat. In 1896 he empirically calculated an early law for black body radiation. That work led his colleague at the University of Göttingen, Max Planck, to formulate the law for black body radiation that bears Planck’s name. Wien also empirically developed a formula relating the peak wavelength of black body radiation with the temperature of the body. For the collection of work, he was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physics. Outside of his study of black body radiation, he also performed early work on mass spectrometry. In 1898, while studying ionized gases, he identified a positively charged particle with mass equal to the hydrogen atom. The particle’s existence was confirmed in 1919 by Ernest Rutherford and named the proton.

Date in History: 13 January 1864