Ohm's law was so coldly received that Ohm quit his teaching job
Today every electronics student learns that current rises in step with voltage. When a Cologne schoolteacher named Georg Ohm published that relationship in 1827, his own college was unimpressed and he resigned. Recognition took fourteen years, arriving from London with the Royal Society's Copley Medal.
Ohm was born in 1789 in Erlangen, son of a locksmith who had never been formally schooled but taught himself, and his sons, to a high level in mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy. Only three of the seven children survived to adulthood; Georg's brother Martin also became a noted mathematician. A University of Erlangen professor compared the family to the Bernoullis. School itself offered Georg little science, and his father, worried he was squandering his chances, sent him to teach mathematics in Switzerland at 17.
His early career was a string of poorly paid posts. He took a doctorate at Erlangen in 1811 but could not live on a lecturer's salary, then taught at a weak school in Bamberg that closed in 1816. He wrote a geometry textbook to prove himself and sent it to King Wilhelm III of Prussia, who was pleased enough to arrange a post at the Jesuit Gymnasium in Cologne in 1817. Its well-equipped physics laboratory, plus the mechanical skills of a locksmith's son, let him build his own apparatus to study Volta's new electrochemical cell.
In papers from 1825 and 1826 he examined how a wire's effect weakened with length and modelled electrical conduction on Joseph Fourier's theory of heat flow. His 1827 book, The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically, stated the law linking voltage, current and resistance and pictured electricity passing between neighbouring particles rather than acting at a distance. It seeded circuit theory, though that field only flourished late in the century. After resigning, Ohm moved to the Polytechnic School of Nuremberg in 1833 and became professor of experimental physics in Munich in 1852.
The Copley Medal came in 1841, foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1842, and the SI unit of resistance now bears his name. He also proposed an acoustic law, that the ear hears musical sound as a set of pure tones, which is known to be not quite correct. He died in Munich in 1854.
Source: Georg Ohm
