August 10, 1794
Birth of Leopold Zunz in Detmold, Germany. Zunz was a historian of Jewish literature and succeeded in bringing scientific rigor to the field. In his work Zur Geschichte und Literatur he integrated Jewish literature with European literature and politics.
August 10, 1827
Birth of Adalbert Falk in Metschkau, Prussia. He was in charge of the “Kurlturkampf” against the Roman Catholic Church. His title was Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education.
August 10, 1868
Birth of Hugo Eckener in Flensburg, Germany. It was Eckener who commanded the dirigible, Graf Zeppelin, on its around-the-world flight in 1929 and a number of other spectacular flights. Out of favor with the Nazi government, he had been relieved of command just prior to the 1937 disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
August 10, 1877
Birth of Rudolf Hilferding in Vienna, Austria. Hilferding was a leader in Viennese Marxism. He became a German citizen in 1920. He fled Germany during WWII but was captured. He died in a prison in Paris in 1941.
August10, 1878
Birth of Alfred Döblin in Settin, Germany. Döblin was a novelist of the Expressionist period. During WWII he lived in the United States. His works include, Wallenstein, Berge, Meere und Giganten and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
August 10, 1895
Death of Ernst Felix Hoppe-Seyler in Wasserburg am Bodensee, Germany. Hoppe-Seyler was a physician who worked to establish biochemistry as an academic discipline. He was the first to extract lecithin in a pure form. He introduced the term protein.
August 10, 1896
Death of Otto Lilienthal in Berlin, Germany. He was an aeronautical pioneer. He experimented with flying machines with flapping wings and wings as gliders. He made over 2,000 experimental flights with gliders. His book Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (1889) and aeronautical articles he published based on his experiments were used by the Wright brothers in their experiments. Lilienthal was killed in one of his experimental flights.
August 10, 1913
Birth of Wolfgang Paul in Lorenzkirch, Germany. A physicist, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 for the invention of a device which captures ions and retains them to allow measurement. He taught at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen.
August 10, 1979
Death of Walther Gerlach in Munich, Germany. Gerlach was a professor of physics at the University of Tübingen and Munich. He did substantial work on the deflection of atoms in a non-homogeneous magnetic field.
