A Discussion on the early days of ionospheric research and the theory of electric and magnetic waves in the ionosphere and magnetosphere - Trends in early ionospheric research in Germany

Abstract

If one is asked to contribute an historical account on the occasion of an anniversary, as I see it there are two possible approaches: either to give a survey of the facts as completely as possible or to base the contribution on personal recollections which is of course much more subjective and somewhat more lively. The former I have tried to do in my written contribution to the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of the Ionosphere in J. appl. terr. Phys , and in this paper I should like to attempt the second approach. When Appleton made his famous discovery, I was still a schoolboy but nevertheless already interested in radio propagation and what was then called the Heaviside layer. Having been a broadcast listener since 1924, and a real ‘ham ’ since 1925, I had experienced the queer propagation phenomena that occurs on medium and short waves. When I entered the Technical University at Munich in 1926, I soon became confronted in Zenneck’s institute with the literature on this new field of physics. By good fortune, Zenneck was editor of the periodical that was then called Jahrbuch der drahtlosen Telegraphie and his abstracts of the pertinent publication in the Proc. Inst Radio Engrs, Proc. R. Soc. Lond . A and The Electrician , were famous for their conciseness and clarity. Having been educated at a Bavarian humanistic Gymnasium, I had learnt Latin, Greek and French, but no English, and for this reason Zenneck’s abstracts were very helpful to me.