All Topics  
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld
 
 
  Topics Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Topic Home

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1882 – August 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary, also known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Kaiserlich und k?niglich Monarchy was a state in Central Europe ruled by the House of Habsburg, constitutionally a personal union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary....
 (now called Lviv
Lviv

Lviv is a major city in western Ukraine.It is regarded as one of the main Ukrainian culture. In 2001, it had 725,000 inhabitants, of whom 88 per cent were Ukrainians, 9 per cent Russians and 1 per cent Poles....
 in Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
).

. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities....
 (renamed in 1949), Berlin, on February 18, 1905. From 1900 to 1904 he studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities....
 in Berlin
Berlin

Berlin is the Capital of Germany city and one of sixteen States of Germany of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is the country's largest city....
. In 1905 he started to work at the physics institute at the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest University in Europeand currently the List_of_universities_in_Germany#Universities_by_age university in Germany....
. Lilienfeld attained the habilitation in 1910.

enfeld's early career was at the University of Leipzig, where he did important early work on electrical discharges in "vacuum", between metal electrodes, from about 1910 onwards.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Julius Edgar Lilienfeld'
Start a new discussion about 'Julius Edgar Lilienfeld'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1882 – August 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary, also known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Kaiserlich und k?niglich Monarchy was a state in Central Europe ruled by the House of Habsburg, constitutionally a personal union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary....
 (now called Lviv
Lviv

Lviv is a major city in western Ukraine.It is regarded as one of the main Ukrainian culture. In 2001, it had 725,000 inhabitants, of whom 88 per cent were Ukrainians, 9 per cent Russians and 1 per cent Poles....
 in Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
).

Education

Ph.D. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities....
 (renamed in 1949), Berlin, on February 18, 1905. From 1900 to 1904 he studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities....
 in Berlin
Berlin

Berlin is the Capital of Germany city and one of sixteen States of Germany of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is the country's largest city....
. In 1905 he started to work at the physics institute at the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest University in Europeand currently the List_of_universities_in_Germany#Universities_by_age university in Germany....
. Lilienfeld attained the habilitation in 1910.

Career

Lilienfeld's early career was at the University of Leipzig, where he did important early work on electrical discharges in "vacuum", between metal electrodes, from about 1910 onwards. His early passion was to clarify how the phenomena changed as vacuum preparation techniques improved. More than any other scientist, he was responsible for the identification of (what we would now call) field electron emission as a separate physical effect. (He called it "auto-electronic emission", and was interested in it as a possible electron source for miniaturised X-ray tubes, in medical applications.) Lilienfeld was responsible for the first reliable account in English of the experimental phenomenology of field electron emission, in 1922. The effect itself was explained by Fowler
Ralph H. Fowler

Sir Ralph Howard Fowler Order of the British Empire Royal Society was a British physicist and astronomer....
 and Nordheim
Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim

Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim was a Germans-born Jewish theoretical physicist. He taught at Duke University.His name is sometimes miss-spelled as Lother....
, in 1928.

Lilienfeld moved to the United States in the early 1920s, originally in order to defend patents he possessed, and then made a scientific/industrial career there.

Among other things, he invented the MOSFET
MOSFET

The metal?oxide?semiconductor field-effect transistor is a device used to amplify or switch electronic signals. The basic principle of the device was first proposed by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925....
 (in 1925) and the electrolytic capacitor
Electrolytic capacitor

electrolytic capacitor is a type of capacitor that uses an ionic conducting liquid as one of its plates with a larger capacitance per unit volume than other types, they are valuable in relatively high-current and low-frequency electrical electrical network....
 in the 1920s. He filed several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors as well as many features of modern transistors. When Brattain
Walter Houser Brattain

Walter Houser Brattain was an United States physicist at Bell Labs who, along with John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the transistor. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention....
, Bardeen
John Bardeen

John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS t...
 and Shockley
William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley was a Kingdom of Great Britain-born United States physicist and inventor.Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics....
 tried to get a patent on their device, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patents.

The optical radiation emitted when electrons are hitting a metal surface is named "Lilienfeld radiation" after he first discovered it close to X-ray tube
X-ray tube

An X-ray tube is a vacuum tube that produces X-rays. They are part of X-ray machines. X-rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, an ionizing radiation with wavelength just shorter than ultraviolet light....
 anode
Anode

An anode is an electrode through which electric charge flows into a polarized electrical device. Mnemonic: ACID . Electrons flow in the opposite direction to the positive electric current....
s. Its origin is attributed to the excitation of plasmons in the metal surface.

The American Physical Society has named one of its major prizes after Lilienfeld.

Personal life

Lilienfeld emigrated to the USA in 1927 and became a U.S. citizen in 1934. He took an American wife, Beatrice Ginsburg. They were married in New York City on May 2, 1926, and lived in Winchester, Mass., for some time, when Lilienfeld was director of the Ergon Research Laboratories in Malden, Mass. In 1935 he and his wife built a house in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the hope of escaping an allergy associated with wheat fields from which Lilienfeld had suffered for most of his life. Lilienfeld frequently traveled between St. Thomas and various mainland locations and continued to test new ideas and patent the resulting products.

Lilienfeld's patents


External links