[3] After attending a private school as well as the Cölnische Humanistische Gymnasium, he entered the University of Berlin in 1844 where took his doctor's degree three years later under the supervision of Heinrich Gustav Magnus.
The attention he had paid to chemistry in the earlier part of his career enabled him to hold his own in this position, but he found his work more congenial when in 1887 he was transferred to the professorship of physics.
In 1877 he undertook the editorship of the Annalen der Physik und Chemie in succession to Johann Christian Poggendorff, thus starting the series of that scientific periodical which is familiarly cited as Wied.
His data for the thermal conductivity of various metals were for long the most trustworthy at the disposal of physicists, and his determination of the ohm in terms of the specific resistance of mercury showed remarkable skill in quantitative research.
[citation needed] Their eldest son, Eilhard Ernst Gustav, born in Berlin on 1 August 1852, became professor of physics at Erlangen in 1886, and his younger son, Alfred, born in Berlin on 18 July 1856, was appointed to the extraordinary professorship of Egyptology at Bonn in 1892.