Carl August von Steinheil

Carl August von Steinheil was an Alsatian physicist, inventor, engineer and astronomer who lived from 12 October 1801 to 14 September 1870. Born in Ribeauvillé in Alsace, he first studied law at Erlangen, then turned to astronomy at Gottingen and Konigsberg and continued astronomy and physics near Munich. From 1832 to 1849 he was professor of mathematics and physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. He took up the daguerreotype early in Germany, built what is described as the first portable metal camera in the world by December 1839, and later designed telegraph networks, serving on the Austrian Trade Ministry telegraph board and starting the Swiss telegraph network in 1851. His inventions include the use of ground return for electric telegraph circuits, an electric clock, the Steinheil script for printing telegraph signals, and the Steinheil doublet lens. In 1854 he founded the optical and astronomical firm C. A. Steinheil and Sons, which built telescopes, spectroscopes and photometers for observatories in Uppsala, Mannheim, Leipzig and Utrecht. Research published in 2024 showed that the earliest paper photographic negatives credited to him had been made by Wolfgang Franz von Kobell in 1837.