WEBER, WILHELM EDUARD German physicist, was born at Wittenberg on Oct. 24, 1804, and was a younger brother of Ernst Heinrich Weber, the author of Weber's Law. He studied at Halle, and at Gottingen, was one of the seven professors who were expelled for protesting against the action of the king of Hanover (duke of Cumberland) in suspending the constitution. In 1849, he returned to Gottingen, where he died on June 23, 1891.
There was no system either of stating or measuring electrical quantities; but he showed, as his colleague K. F. Gauss did for magnetic quantities, that it is both theoretically and practically possible to define them, not merely by reference to other arbitrary quantities of the same kind, but in terms in which the units of length, time and mass are involved. Weber's theory of electricity was founded on the views of Fechner who considered that positive and negative charges move in a conductor with equal and opposite velocities. From this, he worked out the law of forces between
charges. Weber's work on electricity did much to stimulate mathe matical physicists. He also carried on extensive researches in the theory of magnetism, and developed Faraday's ideas regarding his explanation of diamagnetic phenomena. In his observations in terrestrial magnetism he not only employed an early form of mirror galvanometer, but, about 1833, devised a system of electromagnetic telegraphy, by which a distance of some 9,00o ft. was worked over. In conjunction with his elder brother he pub lished in 1825 a well-known treatise on waves, Die Wellenlehre oaf Experimente gegriindet; and in 1833 he collaborated with his younger brother, the physiologist Eduard Friedrich Weber (1806 1871), in an investigation into the mechanism of walking.