About the Author

David Cahan is the Charles Bessey Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt 1871-1918 and coauthor of Science at the American Frontier: A Biography of DeWitt Bristol Brace. He is the editor of Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science and Helmholtz's Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays.