Augustin Maior
| Augustin Maior | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 22, 1882 Szászrégen, Austria-Hungary (today Reghin, Romania) |
| Died | October 3, 1963 (aged 81) Cluj, Romania (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania) |
| Citizenship | Hungarian, Romanian |
| Nationality | Romanian |
| Fields | Physics |
| Education | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute in Budapest |
Augustin Maior (22 August 1882 – 3 October 1963) was a Romanian physicist, educator and inventor.
Maior was born in Reghin, Transylvania (then Szászrégen, part of Austria-Hungary) on 21 August 1882. His parents, Teresa (a well-educated woman) and George (teacher and then director of the Romanian Primary School in Reghin) had five children: Olivia, Augustin, Julius, George and Ana.
Maior's early years of schooling in Reghin were in German: his kindergarten, primary and secondary schooling were at the German Evangelical School. Then he attended the Piarist High School in Târgu Mureș and Catholic High School in Budapest. In addition to a facility for learning foreign languages, he showed promise in physics and mathematics. He passed the Baccalaureate exam in 1900 and then until 1904 he attended the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute in Budapest. In 1905 he attended several postgraduate courses at renowned universities in Vienna, Munich and Göttingen, where he met many of the leading scientific personalities of the time, such as David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Felix Klein, Carl David Tolmé Runge, Eduard Riecke, Ludwig Prandtl, Emil Wiechert and the younger physicists such as Max Born, Max von Laue and Peter Debye.
In November 1905, Maior was employed as an engineer in the Electricity Laboratory of the General Directorate of Posts in Budapest. In 1906 he managed to transmit five calls simultaneously on a single 15-km telephone line, without interference between them. His "Theoretical Foundations of Multiple Telephony" was published in 1907 in the "Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift" and then, in 1914, "The Use of High-Frequency Alternating Currents in Telegraphy, Telephony and for Power Transmission" was published in "The Electrician."
After World War I and the union of Transylvania with Romania, Maior offered his expertise to the Romanian authorities, becoming director general of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones of Transylvania and Banat. Almost simultaneously, in July 1919, he was appointed professor at the University of Cluj and then director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Faculty of Technology. During 1929-1946 he served as dean of the faculty. He taught physics courses containing many modern ideas such as "Electricity and Magnetism" and "acoustics and optics," for which he published textbooks in various editions.
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