Karl Mey (March 1879 – May 1945) was a prominent German industrial physicist who directed the research and development branch of Osram AG. His presidency of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, starting the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, was crucial in that organization's ability to assert its independence from National Socialist policies.

Education

Mey studied physics and mathematics at the

Humboldt University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

from 1897. He received his doctorate in 1902 under

Emil Warburg Emil Gabriel Warburg (; 9 March 1846 – 28 July 1931) was a German physicist who during his career was professor of physics at the Universities of Strassburg, Freiburg and Berlin. He was president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 1899� ...

; his thesis was on the cathode gradient of alkali metals.

Career

After receipt of his doctorate, Mey was employed at the Militärversuchsamt Tegel and then at the

Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft AG (AEG; ) was a German producer of electrical equipment founded in Berlin as the ''Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte Elektricität'' in 1883 by Emil Rathenau. During the World War II, Second W ...

, where he specialized in research and development of

incandescent light bulb An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb with a vacuum or inert gas to protect the filament from oxida ...

s. He became head of the AEG light bulb factory in 1909.Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see the entry for Karl Mey. During

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, from 1914 to 1917, he served in the infantry and saw action at the Western Front. After the war, Mey was again employed at AEG. After the merger of AEG, the Auer Company, and

Siemens & Halske Siemens & Halske AG (or Siemens-Halske) was a German electrical engineering company that later became part of Siemens. It was founded on 12 October 1847 as ''Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske'' by Werner von Siemens and Johann Geo ...

into Osram AG in Berlin, he supervised the whole research and development branch. Mey was active in a number of professional organizations and held offices in them. Circa 1931, he became vice-chairman of the Deutsche Glastechnische Gesellschaft (German Technical Glass Society). From 1931 to 1945, he was president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Physik (German Society for Technical Physics). During the period 1933 to 1935, he was the president of the

Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple ...

(Acronym: DPG; translation: German Physical Society.). With Mey being elected president of the DPG during the year that

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

became Chancellor of Germany, as opposed to the Nobel Laureate

Johannes Stark Johannes Stark (, 15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields". This phen ...

, who was a supporter of the

anti-Semitic Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

Deutsche Physik ''Deutsche Physik'' (, "German Physics") or Aryan Physics (german: Arische Physik) was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s which had the support of many eminent physicists in Germany. The term was taken ...

, the DPG asserted its independence from slavishly following

National Socialist Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...

policies. In May 1945, Mey was arrested by Russian forces as a “leading military industrialist” and deported to the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

Selected Literature

*Karl Mey ''Über das Kathodengefälle der Alkalimetalle'', ''Annalen der Physik'' Volume 316, Issue 5, pp. 127–145 (1903)Harvard Abstracts
/ref>

Selected Patents

*Patent for: Electric lamp. Patent number: 2208998. Filing date: 8 November 1937. Issue date: July 1940. Inventor: Karl Mey. Assignee: General Electric Company, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany.

Bibliography

*Hentschel, Klaus, editor and Ann M. Hentschel, editorial assistant and Translator ''Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources'' (Birkhäuser, 1996) *Hoffmann, Dieter ''Between Autonomy and Accommodation: The German Physical Society during the Third Reich'', ''Physics in Perspective'' 7(3) 293-329 (2005)

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mey, Karl 1879 births 1945 deaths 20th-century German physicists Humboldt University of Berlin alumni German people who died in Soviet detention German Army personnel of World War I