Wilhelm Weber was the German physicist who defined many of the units for electricity and magnetism and developed sensitive instruments to measure electrical and magnetic quantities. His early research concentrated on the acoustic theory of reed organ pipes, but while he was working at Göttingen (1831-1837) he joined Gauss in the study of geomagnetism. Their laboratories were the first in the world to be connected by electric telegraph (1833) and they established a network of magnetic observation posts to correlate their measurements. It was here that Weber developed a sensitive electrodynamometer (1845) which he used to measure electric currents and also to define an electromagnetic unit for electric current. With Rudolph Kohlrausch in 1855, they found that the ratio between the electromagnetic and electrodynamic units of charge was a constant equal to the speed of light, a discovery that was important for James Clerk Maxwell's development of his electromagnetic theory. Weber was amongst the first to suggest that electricity consisted of charged particles and it was the collisions of these particles with others that produced resistance. His name is given to the SI unit of magnetic flux.
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