Early Life and Work
Philipp Lénárd was born in Bratislava (Pressburg), Kingdom of Hungary (then Czechoslovakia, now: Slovakia), on July 7, 1862, as the son of a wine merchant. Lenard's parents were German-speakers, and the Lenard family had originally come from Tyrol in the 17th century. His father Philipp von Lenardis (1812-1896) was a wine-merchant in Pressburg. His mother was Antoine Baumann (1831-1865). The young Lenard studied at the Royal Hungarian Gymnasium, and as he writes it in his autobiography, this made a big impression on him (especially the personality of his teacher, Virgil Klatt). In 1880 he studied physics and chemistry in Vienna and in Budapest. In 1882 he left Budapest and returned to Pressburg but in 1883 Lenard moved to Heidelberg after his tender for an assistant job in the University of Budapest was refused. In Heidelberg he studied under the illustrious Robert Bunsen, interrupted by one semester in Berlin with Hermann von Helmholtz, and obtained his doctoral degree in 1886. In 1887 he worked again in Budapest under Loránd Eötvös as a demonstrator. After posts at Aachen, Bonn, Breslau, Heidelberg (1896–1898), and Kiel (1898–1907), he returned finally to the University of Heidelberg in 1907 as the head of the Philipp Lenard Institute. In 1905 Philip Lénárd became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1907 of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
His early work included studies of phosphorescence and luminescence and the conductivity of flames.
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