Feature

Heinrich Rubens, Herbert Hollnagel, and Fourier transform spectroscopy

Pierre Connes, Michael Smyth, Armand Hadni, and Xavier Gerbaux

An important missed connection is obvious today: neither Michelson nor Rayleigh ever paid any attention to the work of Heinrich Rubens (1865-1922), then professor of experimental physics at the University of Berlin, who from 1910 onward published interferograms indistinguishable from modern ones and made trial-and-error reconstructions of the spectra. In this primitive way, Rubens actually had solved the phase problem and removed the ambiguity that always plagued Michelson.

Publish Date: 01 March 1988