Winfried Otto Schumann

Winfried Otto Schumann ( born May 20, 1888 in Tübingen, † September 22, 1974 in Munich) was a German physicist who became known by the prediction of the Schumann resonance.

Life

He spent his youth in Kassel and in Bern village near Vienna. He studied electrical engineering at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe. In 1912 he received his doctorate in the subject field of high voltage technology.

Before World War II, he was head of the high voltage laboratory at Brown, Boveri & Cie. In 1920 he became a professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart, where he worked as a research assistant before. He then became a professor of physics at the University of Jena. He then became a professor in 1924 at the electrophysical laboratory of the Technical University of Munich, later electric Physical Institute, where he worked until his retirement in 1961 and beyond until the age of 75 years. In 1947 he was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Schumann died at the age of 86 years.

Work

Schumann postulated that the ionosphere, a part of the earth's atmosphere, a cavity forms, so that adjust standing electromagnetic waves with certain resonant frequencies. He examined this phenomenon in the light of damping and excitation of resonances by lightning in a series of articles in the years 1952-57. These resonant waves have been named after him as Schumann resonances and have been demonstrated experimentally in 1960.