Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein
Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein (30 January 1723, Wernigerode – 6 July 1795, Copenhagen) was a German-born medical doctor, physicist and engineer.
Kratzenstein was baptized on 2 February 1723 in Wernigerode, Sachsen-Anhalt, Holy Roman Empire and grew up there in an academic family together with three brothers.
[2] In 1742 Kratzenstein started to study physics and medicine at the university in Halle which at that time had a leading position in that region.
[1] At that time Kratzenstein had achieved international recognition and was in 1748 called to the science academy in Saint Petersburg.
It is likely that Leonhard Euler, who had worked there earlier before he took up a new position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, had used his influence in this connection.
These were tried out in 1753 on a ship expedition from Arkhangelsk along the Norwegian coast through Kattegat and the Baltic Sea back to Saint Petersburg.
[4] Kratzenstein became known in a short time as an engaging lecturer and attracted a large audience of both regular students and interested persons from the citizenry.
He covered topics ranging from the newest insights about plants and animals, through geology, physiology to physics and chemistry.
A few years later this fund enabled Hans Christian Ørsted to build up his own laboratory for physical experiments.
It was published in several editions and appeared in German, French and Latin in addition to the Danish version.
He excelled more by practical investigations and building of instruments than by developing new theoretical insights that would survive his own times.
As a student in Halle Kratzenstein made his first step to fame by his pamphlet Beweis, dass die Seele ihren Körper baue in 1743.
[10] Based on these ideas and investigations by Kratzenstein there have been speculations that he could have been a model for the fictitious doctor Frankenstein in the book of the same name written by Mary Shelley several decades later.
Together with a similar thesis about bodily fluids and their properties, Kratzenstein received in 1746 a doctor's degree both in physics and in medicine.
During the five years at the science academy in Saint Petersburg Kratzenstein was to a large extent occupied by improving methods and equipment for navigation on the high seas.
These new instruments were tried out on the voyage from Arkhangelsk to Saint Petersburg in 1753 Kratzenstein discovered that the Norwegian coast was placed 150 km too far east on contemporary maps.
[4] Many years later in 1793 Kratzenstein received a prize from the academy in Saint Petersburg for these observations and other magnetic measurements made on the same voyage.
[3] In April 1765 at Saint Petersburg, Kratzenstein presented to the Russian Academy of Sciences a perfected version of the stepped reckoner arithmetical machine originally invented by Gottfried Leibniz.
Thus by a royal decree from Christian VII an expedition to the northernmost military post in Vardø was established.
Euler speculated that it should perhaps be possible to build some kind of musical instrument which could produce similar sounds and string them together to understandable words.
This instrument was demonstrated in Saint Petersburg to the full satisfaction of the academy, but was damaged and disappeared shortly afterwards.
[4] But the use of free reeds in musical instruments became later widespread and can today be found in the harmonica, accordion, harmonium and bandoneon.
It is not known how Kratzenstein got the idea to use them, but they had for a long time been a central part of the Chinese musical instrument sheng.
