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  • Walter Schottky, Atomtheoretiker und Elektrotechniker: Sein Leben und Werk bis ins Jahr 1941
  • Thomas Kaiserfeld (bio)
Walter Schottky, Atomtheoretiker und Elektrotechniker: Sein Leben und Werk bis ins Jahr 1941. By Reinhard W. Serchinger. Diepholz: GNT Verlag, 2008. Pp. 685. €50.

Regardless of your acquaintance with the Schottky effect, the Schottky diode, or other phenomena and artifacts named after the German physicist and corporate scientist of the Siemens Company, Walter Schottky (1886–1976), there may be reasons to read this pioneering biography. Approved as a doctoral dissertation in Munich, the account stretches from the First World War over the Weimar Republic into the Nazi period, thus covering a time when [End Page 754] German physics and electrical engineering led the world. Still, you need to be something of a diehard fan of German Gründlichkeit in order to appreciate its excruciating detail. A plethora of quotations from letters, postcards, dairy entries, patents, scientific publications, and reminiscences, all in all making up about 50 percent of the text, certainly gives life to both environment and individual. But this petty flood also hampers the historical analysis of a professional life in corporate research. And the vast secondary literature on the theme has left but a few marks on Reinhard Serchinger's study.

Walter Schottky earned his Ph.D. in relativistic dynamics in 1912 under the supervision of Max Planck in Berlin, a feat followed by a few years of experimental electronics research at the University of Jena. Here he formulated a relation between current and voltage of electrical fields in a vacuum. The outbreak of war in 1914 intensified military interest in work on vacuum tubes and the amplification of radio signals, and Schottky's experience as experimenter as well as his theoretical understanding of physical principles made him an attractive partner for corporations such as Telefunken and Siemens. It was during this time that he discovered the Schottky effect, i.e., the enhancement of thermionic emission of a conductor resulting from an electric field at its surface. After he sold his patent rights to Siemens in 1915, his engagement with the company grew deeper, and he was employed a year later to further develop a screen-grid tube as well as a number of multi-grid tubes.

His engagement in industrial research had not barred Schottky from academic contacts, which he pursued vigorously. In 1920 he picked up a promising academic career, teaching at Würzburg and later at Rostock, where he was recommended for a full professorship by la crème de la crème of German physicists: Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Arnold Sommerfeld. But when Siemens sought to attract well-renowned researchers in 1927, Schottky went back to industrial research in Berlin, devoting his time to solid-state physics and developing semiconductors and contacts, for example the Schottky barrier diode.

The best part of this dissertation biography is no doubt the epilogue, where the author's comparative analysis of Siemens and its main German competitor in electrical equipment, AEG, shows a marked difference in research policies. While AEG bought rights to use patents and focused research on problems of construction, Siemens programmatically tried to attract outstanding researchers and give them resources as well as freedom to develop original ideas for patenting. (There was a period in the early 1930s, however, when Siemens management tried to get better control over research activities; see Helmut Schubert, "Industrielaboratorien für Wissenschaftstransfer: Aufbau und Entwicklung der Siemensforschung bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges anhand von Beispielen aus der Halbleiterforschung," Centaurus 30 [1987], a reference overlooked by Serchinger.) In such an environment, it was less awkward to hire a willful academic such as Schottky. [End Page 755]

When it comes to accounting for source material regarding the life of Walter Schottky, this dissertation should please even the most dedicated enthusiast. Although there can be no doubt that its main character is one of the most important German developers of vacuum tubes, together with Hans Rukop and Heinrich Barkhausen, the author's attention to empirical detail devastates any ambitions for synthesis beyond the observation that Schottky to a large extent remained an academic. Rather than being integrated into a research team, Schottky's...

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