Christian Doppler Biography

Christian Doppler: A Biography

Have you ever wondered why a car is much louder coming towards you, than it is going away from you? Or, have you been baffled at how loud an ambulance siren is before it passes you, only for it to be much quieter going away from you? This trend has been dubbed the “Doppler Effect” and was named after proclaimed physicist Christian Doppler. Through years of schooling and many more years of teaching, Doppler was able to amass plenty of credibility in the field of science, and make countless achievements in the realm of physics.

Christian Doppler was born November 29, 1803 to a stonemason and his wife in the town of Salzburg, Austria. His father, one in a long line of master stonemasons, operated a successful business in town that utilized the local marble quarries. Christian was forced, however, to forgo his family’s business because of his frail health, and he sought other opportunities in the work force. After high school, he attended the Vienna Polytechnic Institute in 1822 on a recommendation by his secondary school professor. There, he began his studies in mathematics and excelled in that field so much so that he graduating from the Institute three years later in 1825. From there, Doppler attended the University of Vienna to study higher mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics. Once he completed his studies in 1829, Christian began working for Professor Adam von Burg who taught mechanics and mathematics at the university. After being Burg’s assistant for only two years, Doppler published his first of eventually fifty-one scientific publications, titled A contribution to the theory of parallels. Doppler would go on to write three more publications before leaving the university to pursue a more perm...

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...he further he went in his educational career.

Before Doppler had proposed his theory that the frequency of sound and light waves changes based on the velocities of the objects being measured, no previous work had been done regarding this phenomenon. Three years after Doppler’s proposal, Buys Ballot, a famous chemist and meteorologist, did an experiment that would soon become famous throughout the world. In order to test Doppler’s hypothesis, Ballot had a group of musicians playing a specified note on a train, and also had musicians on the ground as the train passed to verify what note was being played. When the frequency of the note changed from when the train was approaching and after it had passed, Buys Ballot knew that Doppler’s proposal was indeed correct with respect to the sound waves.

Coincidentally, a French physicist named Hippolyte Fizeau was working on