Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/571

Rh the fundamental cliaracter and far-reaching importance of "Weber's work; and, owing mainly to his clear-sighted advocacy of the absolute system of measurement, this system was from the first adopted as the basis for the operations of the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards, appointed originally in 1862. "This system has now become so familiar to electricians, and is taken so much as a matter of course, that it requires some mental effort to recall the state of science when it did not exist, and to appreciate the intellectual greatness of the man to whom it is due. If we consider method and point of view, rather than acquired results, it is not too much to say that the idea of absolute measurements, underlying as it does the conception of the conservation of energy, constitutes the most characteristic difference between modern physics and the physics of the early part of our century. And to no one man is so large a share in this great step due as to Wilhelm Eduard Weber."

Weber, in conjunction with Kohlrausch, determined the relations between electrical and magnetic measurements expressed in the same unities, concerning which there seems to have been some confusion. He determined the chemical actions by electrolysis which correspond with the passage of a unity of current in a second, and by this furnished a practical means of reconstituting that unity in experiments. He pointed out and put in practice some of the most precise methods for determining the numerical value, as related to the fundamental unities, of the electrical resistance of a conductor. His name is also associated with numerous labors for fixing the value of the practical unity of resistance, or the ohm, in terms of the mercurial column.

So retired was Weber's life in his later days that, though his fame had not diminished, the world had almost forgotten that he was still in it; and it is said that when, at the meeting of the German naturalists in Berlin a few years ago, the name of Weber was read in the list of those who had taken part in the first meeting held there in 1828, surprise was expressed at recognizing in their octogenarian friend one who had sat there with Berzelius and Ohm and Heim.

Weber was a corresponding member of the Institute of France, and had been a foreign member of the Royal Society since 1850.