Wichard Lange School', and granddaughter of Wilhelm Middendorff [de], who founded the first German kindergarten, together with Friedrich Fröbel.

Beginning in the summer semester of 1904, he had already begun scientific work in the Physics Institute with Emil Warburg on the topic which became his doctoral thesis.

[2] His first publication dates from this period,[3] motivated by Bernhard Walter of the Hamburg State Physical Laboratory, where Pohl worked during his vacations, in particular attempting to observe the diffraction of X-ray radiation.

Following his Habilitation, Pohl began giving lecture courses on experimental physics, which also motivated him to start acquiring a private collection of lecture-demonstration apparatus.

His suggestion, together with Erich Regener, to set up and operate privately-funded diagnostic X-ray apparatus in two military reserve hospitals was gratefully accepted.

In November 1914, he began cooperating with military radio operators on locating enemy transmission stations; this led to his appointment to a position as chief engineer with the rank of captain on the Board of Transport Examiners (VPK), which he held until the end of the war.

In February 1916, Pohl received the offer of an associate professorship in Göttingen (as successor to Eduard Riecke), but due to the war, he was unable to accept the position until early 1919.

Because of the offer of a professorship at the Technical University of Stuttgart in September 1919, Pohl was promoted to Full Professor in Göttingen in December 1920 and became director of the 1st Physical Institute there.

[13] By inserting three electrodes into a potassium bromide crystal, Pohl and Rudolf Hilsch were able to demonstrate the first model of a transistor based on color centers in 1938.

With the zoologist Alfred Kühn, he investigated the color perception of bees;[15] for the chemist Adolf Windaus, he applied optical spectroscopy to the separation of Ergosterol from Cholesterol.

[17] He gave active support to his student Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain when the latter began the first experiments on jet propulsion following completion of his doctoral thesis, in the Physics Institute but privately financed.

It also includes a video on current amplification by a three-electrode crystal,[14] and also an audio recording of the conferral of an honorary doctorate on Ernest Rutherford in Göttingen by the Dean Max Born (1931).

According to this source, he never joined a political party, and his attitude towards the National Socialists ranged from reserved to hostile; he was convinced from the beginning of the eventual defeat of Germany in the Second World War (he had contacts to the Goerdeler Group; his contact, the teacher and lecturer Hermann Kaiser, was sentenced to death and was executed on the 23 January 1945 in Berlin-Ploetzensee).

[21] In 1956, the first International Color Center Conference took place at Argonne National Laboratory; it was repeated at three-year intervals in the following years until 1977.