Joseph Petzval
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Jozef Maximilián Petzval (Slovak) (Josef Maximilian Petzvalin German, Petzvál József Miksa in Hungarian) (born January 6, 1807 in Spišská Belá, then Kingdom of Hungary – died September 19, 1891 in Vienna) was a Slovak mathematician, inventor and physicist best known for his work in optics. Petzval studied and later lectured at the Institutum Geometricum (currently Budapest University of Technology and Economics) in Buda (today part of Budapest). He headed the Institute of Practical Geometry and Hydrology/Architecture between 1841 and 1848. Later in life, he accepted the appointment to the chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna.
Petzval is considered to be one the founders of geometrical optics, modern photography and cinematography. Among his inventions are the Petzval portrait lens and opera glasses, both still in common use today. He is also credited with the discovery of the Laplace transform and is also known for his extensive work on aberration in optical systems. The Petzval crater on the Moon is named after him.
Ethnicity and name
Petzval was born in the Comitatus of Spiš in present-day Slovakia, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, which in turn was part of the Austrian monarchy. His native language was Slovak, though his family seems to have been strongly influenced by the predominantly German population in their native Zips. He spent his youth in what is now Slovakia and moved to present-day Hungary upon completion of his secondary education. He spent the remaining 53 years of his life in Vienna, which is one of the reasons why the majority of his work was printed in German.
Because of this multi-ethnic background, there are several variants of his name in use. The German version is Josef Maximilian Petzval, while he is called Petzval József (or Józeph) in Hungarian sources.
His father, Ján Fridrich Peczival (Petzval) (1775?–1852) was either of Slovak or Czech origin. He was probably the same person as Ján Krtitel Pecival, who was born on July 4, 1775 in Lodenice, Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic). Petzval's father successfully applied for a teaching position at the evangelist school in Spišská Belá. In 1801, he married Zuzana Kreutzmann, a daughter of the previous teacher at the same school in Spišská Belá. She was born in Spišská Belá and was most likely of Slovak ethnicity. The couple brought up six children: Gustáv Adolf (1800–1803), who died prematurely; Nestor Aemilianus (1804–1806); Jozef Maximilián; Petrol Baltazár (1809–1889); and three daughters. In 1810, the family moved to Kežmarok and in 1819 to Levoča.
Jozef's entire family shared an aptitude for technology. His father worked as a teacher and organist in Spišká Belá and later in Kežmarok. He was also a conductor and a geodesist in Levoča. He had a reputation of an outstanding musician and composer, who was also gifted mechanically. In 1824, he was awarded two patents: one for improvements to the pendulum clock and the other for a "polygraph" (typewriter). Jozef's brother, Petrol Baltazár Petzval, was a well-respected mathematician, engineer and astronomer.
Life
Petzval attended elementary school in Kežmarok, and began his secondary school studies in Kežmarok and Podolínec. On October 1, 1819, he returned to his family in Levoča, and entered high school. Both in elementary school and high school he ranked among the best in his class in the subjects of Latin (the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary) and religion; however, he was struggling with his Hungarian. Before arriving to Levoča, he was, interestingly enough, also very weak in mathematics. In Levoča however, he clearly improved in this discipline.
One anecdote told about Petzval is as follows: When his family had already decided to make a shoemaker out of Jozef, he read the book Analytic Paper on the Elements of Mathematics by the German mathematician Hauser over the summer holidays, just after completing his fourth class in elementary school. He was preparing to undergo a repeat class in mathematics. After Petzval finished the book, the child who had been a weak math pupil swiftly became a math genius.
After finishing his high school, Petzval decided to move to the Institutum Geometricum, the engineering faculty of the Pester University. Before that, he had to complete a two-year Lyceum, which he attended from 1823 to 1825 in Košice. When he arrived to Košice in 1823, Petzval was already well-versed in the subjects of Latin, mathematical analysis, classical literature and stylistics, and spoke perfect Czech, German and Hungarian in addition to Slovak and Latin. With his father's assistance, he also learned French and English.
After completing the Lyceum, Petzval worked for a year as an educator for Count Almássy in the Heves Comitatus. In addition to bringing in some urgently-needed money, this experience also provided him with important social contacts.
From 1826 to 1828, Petzval studied at the Institutum Geometricum in Prague, and earned an engineering diploma in 1828. In the same year, he joined the graduate degree program of the university, and became the self-appointed adjunct chair for the Physics Department (in 1831). From 1828 to 1835, Petzval simultaneously worked as an urban engineer for the city of Prague — particularly as a specialist in flood abatement and sewers — and studied mathematics, mechanics and practical geometry. He authored an unrealized plan to build a navigation channel around Prague. In 1830, his dam computations saved Prague from an inundation caused by the flooding of the Vltava. After he received his Ph.D. in 1832, he taught as an associate professor at the university in Budapest. During this period, he also received a degree in mathematics. In 1835, he was appointed a university professor in higher mathematics.
After being invited to the University of Vienna in 1836, he accepted a position of the chair of mathematics there in 1837, and worked until 1877 as a professor of mathematics. Apart from mathematics, he was also concerned with mechanics, ballistics, optics, and acoustics. His lectures on the theory of algebraic equations, which integrated linear and differential equations with constant and variable coefficients, ballistics, acoustic theory, and other areas were high quality and became well attended.
He moved into a rented abandoned monastery at Bald Mountain (according to some sources, after 1859). He founded his own glass-sharpening workshop there. His lenses became world famous because Petzval was also a skillful lens sharpener and precision mechanic.
In 1840, he discovered his famous haven guessing lens. 1845 brought disputes with the entrepreneur Peter Wilhelm Friedrich of Voigtlaender (1812-1878) over who had the right to produce Petzval's lenses. In 1859, Petzval's home was broken into, and his manuscripts - a result of many years of research - were destroyed. Petzval never managed to reconstruct the lost documents. His most refined technical book on optics, lost with his manuscripts, would never appear in print. From then on, he primarily concerned himself with acoustics and began to withdraw from the society. His enterprise with Carl Dietzler failed in 1862 (see further below); Dietzler died in 1872.
In 1869, at the age of 62, Petzval married his female housekeeper, but she died four years later. In 1877, he stopped lecturing, withdrew to the monastery at Bald Mountain, and became a hermit.
Jozef Maximilián Petzval died in Vienna in 1891, nearly forgotten, embittered, and destitute. His grave is in the Viennese central cemetery. His bitterness at the end of his life can probably be traced, on the one hand, to his continuing controversy with Voigtlaender, the loss of his manuscripts, and his business failure; and on the other hand, to the fact that he was never really acknowledged for his lifelong work in the field of optics. Just before his death, Petzval was reported to have said:
- "I defeated the light, I have it firmly in hand, because there is much darkness in the world too."
Private life and hobbies
Petzval was a good sportsman and rider. As a young child in Slovakia he often traveled with his family into High Tatra, and was also a dedicated athlete. In Vienna, he was for a long time the best fencer and ring fighter in the city. He also inherited an excellent talent for music from his father. Allegedly, while he was a lecturer in Vienna, he always rode to his lectures on a black Arabian horse.
Petzval never wanted to communicate anything about his private life, and was therefore relatively inscrutable to others during his lifetime. As Dr. Ermenyi described in his book, Dr. Josef Petzval's Life
- ". . . he went so far as to always insert a bare point for example use the appearing annual yearbook of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, in whatever apart from the names of the members the date and the place appear aforementioned to the birth for itself into this column."
At the end of his life he lived in increasingly greater isolation in his "castle" on Bald Mountain, with only his horse for company, although several academies and scholarly societies appointed him a member (member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna (1846/1849), external member of the Hungarian one Academy of Sciences (1873), honorary member of the union of the Czech mathematicians and physicists (1881), carriers of the French Charles Chevalier Platinmedaille, and others).
Disputes
Petzval placed very high requirements on himself and others. That was probably connected with its critical, contentious and sarcastic nature, which brought him many conflicts, particularly in the field of mathematics.
Petzval had a controversy with Christian Doppler over problems of acoustics, and Doppler responded in 1852 with a book entitled "Remarks Over the Objections Stated by Professor Petzval Against the Correctness of My Theory".
In particular he was involved in lengthy disputes with the entrepreneur Voigtlaender. These began in 1845, when Petzval raised the issue of fraud for the first time. Thereupon Voigtlaender shifted his production to Braunschweig in Germany, where he produced about 60,000 Petzval lenses in the following 20 years. Petzval for his part co-operated since 1854 with the Austrian optics producer Dietzler, so that the Petzval lenses were produced both in Austria by von Dietzler, and in Germany (also for Austria) by Voigtlaender. 1857 besides by Dietzler under the designation "photographic Dialyt" was sold to Petzvals landscape objective, while it sold Voigtlaender as the "Voightlaender Orthoskop". To further machinations Voigtlaenders went however to Dietzler 1862 broke and to threats on the part of Petzvals placed Voigtlaender 1866 all its enterprises into Austria. After this miss, Petzval actually should have transferred the marketing, after the break-down to its house in the year 1859 it however never more with the optics concerned and dedicated themselves from now on to the acoustics. In 1862, he also stopped lecturing on optics.
Discoveries and inventions
Optics
Petzval's greatest achievements lie in his work with geometrical optics. On 19 August 1839 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre presented his Daguerreotype (the first technique of permanent fixed photography) in Paris. After his return from Paris inform Petzvals colleague and friend, which Viennese professor Andreas of Ettingshausen, Petzval over the, at that time, large problem the Daguerrotypie, same that the exposure time for portraits was as long as 30 minutes. On the urging of Ettingshausen Petzval constructed a workshop and laboratory at bald mountain in Vienna and after six months of complicated computations sketched a vierlinsiges haven guessing objective as well as a vierlinsiges landscape objective (both objectives the Petzval lens are usually called). For the computations to it by ore Duke Ludwig (commander in chief of the artillery) 8 artillery Kanoniere and 3 Korporale were provided to the order, since the artillery belonged at that time to the few occupations, with which one mathematical computations made. Petzvals world-wide first haven guessing objective (Petzval Portraetobjektiv) was an almost distortionless anachromatischer Vierlinser (double achromatic objective, 4 lenses in 3 groups). The luminous intensity of this flat "haven guessing lens" was substantially higher than those of the up to then common Daguerre standard of 1839, which was lacking. Wollaston Chevalier Linse (F=1:16). The screen F=1:3,6 with a focal length of 160mm made crucially shorter exposure times possible - depending upon lighting conditions only about 15 to 30 seconds compared to the previous 10 minutes. Thus for the first time snapshots became possible.
The haven guessing lens consisted of a cemented double lens in front (F=1:5) and a double lens with gap in the back. The rear double lens was necessary for the correction of spherical and coma errors. The Chevalier lens used two cemented double lenses, however by the Petzval lens was immediately replaced, so that the Petzval Portraetlinse used also first generally cemented lens was. The first haven guessing lenses were rather small and had a diameter of 2,6 cm. The optics Dietzler produced then however since 1856 Petzval lenses with 15 cm diameters and a weight of 15kg, with which one could make portraits measuring 33 by 42 cm. Still in the same year (1840) Petzval left its haven guessing objective to the Viennese entrepreneur Peter Wilhelm Friedrich of Voigtlaender against a ridiculous one time payment of 2000 guldens, without patenting and without contract, which led later to a durable controversy between Petzval and Voigtlaender. Voigtlaender, which added also a pair computations, built the objectives since 1841 (prototype in May 1840) into the Daguerrotypie cameras produced by it and earned thereby a fortune. The round Daguerreotypie plates concerned of 8 cm diameters exposed a tube camera out of brass. In 1841 600 of these cameras were manufactured and sold at a price of 120 guldens. Voigtlaender received a medal at the world exhibition in Paris for this achievement. These first metal-body cameras were prototypes of today's modern cameras. It took another 50 years until an improved camera became available. Petzval's haven guessing objective was used into the 1920s (often under other names) in cameras and is used also today still in projectors. The objective played an important role with the development of the photography and cinematography. With its landscape objective with four lenses, which was characterised particularly by its high luminous intensity (Orthoskop), Petzval however was dissatisfied and after improvements left it 1857 to produce and patent.
The camera with the new landscape objective, produced by Dietzler, possessed a light foldable chamber with double bellows. In addition, of this objective Petzval had never a commercial profit. Among his inventions in particular the invention of the opera glasses, computations for efficient field glasses, and construction of new headlights rank perfecting the telescope and the microscope (computation of appropriate lens systems, 1843) (1847). His plan for the construction from lighting systems to the lighting of ships on the Danube could not be carried out. His special mirror lamp (Petzval lamp), which a maximum utilization of light energy made possible, particularly for the bright projectors developed by it one used. Due to in its deduction found recording one must regard it also as the inventor of the modern anastigmatischen lens system. Around 1860 it accomplished photogrammetric measurements with one of him designed equipment. Besides it proved scientifically that radiate glowing firm body more light than burning gases. Later on Carl baron Auer von Welsbach applied this principle to the gas lamp designated after it. Petzval's achievements are used today in cinematography, astronomy, and in the measuring technique. In the astronomy was above all the astro+ Petzval objective of importance. This objective made a distortion-free illustration of a large part of the sky, as well as a photographing of galaxies and star fields possible. German optics companies (Toepfer, Voigtlaender, Zeiss) produced the astro+ Petzval objective until 1940. Petzval's largest contribution to optics are his theoretical bases for the construction and correction of optical lens systems. It carried fundamental work out for the theory of the aberrations of optical systems. Some central terms of this field after it were designated later:
- The Petzval surface is the generally curved image plane of a unkorrigierten optical system, a Rotationsparaboloid.
- In the case of adherence to the Petzval condition the Petzval surface is even. Of it more-restrains work prepared over the optics for the largest regret of all physicists never appeared.
Mathematics
In mathematics, Petzval always stressed practical applicability. He said, "Mankind does not exist for science's sake, but science should be operated to improve the conditions of mankind." He worked on applications of the Laplace transformation. Actually it should be called the "Petzval transformation", since he was the first to study it and its applications in usual linear differential equations systematically. His work was very thorough, but not completely satisfying, since he could not use an edge integration in order to invert the transformation. Petzval wrote a paper in two volumes as well as a long work on this subject. A controversy with a student (Simon syringe), who Petzval to injustice of the plagiarism of Pierre Simon de Laplace accused, led however to the fact that the mathematicians George Boole and Jules Henri Poincaré certainly affected by splash designated the transformation later after Laplace. Petzval tried to represent practically everything in his environment mathematically. Thus he tried to mathematically model fencing or the course of the horse. His obsession with mathematics finally led to the discovery of the haven guessing objective.
Acoustics
In the study of acoustics, Petzval was particularly concerned with string oscillations, differential equations of the string oscillations, and the mathematical theory of musical instruments. He designed a piano with three key sequences. Petzval developed a theory of the oscillations of strained strings as well as his own theory of the clay/tone systems. [work on] after it designated objects in its birth house the Jozef Maximilián Petzval museum of the history of the photo and cinematography since 1964 (part of the Slowaki technical museum in Košice) is. A crater on the dark side of the moon (150 km in diameter, 63° in width, 113° in length), as well as roads and statues in modern Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary, have been named after Petzval. In 1980 were designated upon the request of the astronomical institute in Tatranská Lomnica also a planetoid discovered in Tschechien after it (3716 Petzval, 1980 TG), there Petzvals haven guessing objective at the end of the 19th Century the discovery of many planetoids made possible. The Austrian Board of Education has bestowed the Petzval Medal for special achievements in the area of scientific photography since 1928.