On the following Sunday he was followed to the grave by numbers of friends, by all his colleagues and by most of the students of the Munich University. The university felt that it had suffered a great loss, and no signs of its grief were felt to be too much. Ohm was buried in the old Munich graveyard, where his bones still rest, beneath the simple memorial not unworthy of the modest scientist who did his work patiently and quietly, yet with never-failing persistency; who cared not for the applause of the multitude, and accomplished so much quite independently of any of the ordinary helps from others and from great educational institutions that are often supposed to be almost indispensably necessary for the accomplishment of original scientific work.
Ohm's personal appearance will be of interest to many of those to whom his discoveries have made him appeal as one of the great original thinkers in modern science. He was almost small in stature, even below middle height; and those who remember Virchow, may get something of an idea of his appearance when told that those who saw Ohm and knew Virchow, considered that there was a certain reminder of each other in the two men. According to his intimate friend and biographer, he had a very expressive face, with a high, somewhat doubled forehead. His eyes were deep and full of intelligence. His mouth, very sharply defined, betrayed, at the first glance, at once the earnest thinker and the pleasant man of friendly disposition. He was always restful and never seemed to be distracted. He talked but little, but his conversation was always interesting, and, except when he was in some particularly serious mood, was always likely to have a vein of light humor in it. He did not hesitate to introduce a sparkle of wit now and then into his lectures, and especially knew how gently to make fun of mistakes made by his pupils, yet in such a way as not to hurt their feelings, but to make them realize the necessity for more careful thought before giving answers, and for appreciating principles before speculating on them. He was particularly careful not to do anything that would offend his students in any way, and it is to this care that the success of his method of teaching has been especially attributed.
His habits of life were from the beginning of his career simple, and they continued to be so until the end. He was never married, and he himself attributed this to the unfavorable condition of his material resources at the beginning of his career as a teacher, and the fact that the improvement in these did not really come until he was well past fifty years of age. He once confessed to a friend that he missed those modest pleasures of family life which do so much to give courage and strength for the greater as well as the lesser sufferings of life. Most of his years of teaching he spent in boarding houses. Only after his appointment to the professorship at Munich was he able to have a dwelling for himself, which was presided over by a near relative.
Ohm is remembered as a teacher rather than as an educational administrator. His pupils recall him as one who was able to be eminently suggestive, while at the same time he succeeded in making it easy to acquire the details of information. The didactic lecture, as a method of teaching, did not appeal to him, and his success was due to the application of quite other methods. He realized how much personal influence meant, and the peculiarity of his system of teaching was an almost uninterrupted lively personal intercourse with his pupils. Demonstrations and exercises at the board always occupied the first half of his two-hour lesson, and only the other half was devoted to the setting forth of new matter. In this way, Ohm succeeded not only in influencing each student according to his personal endowments, but he also began the training of future teachers by giving them a living example of what their work should be.
The success of Ohm as a teacher was recognized on all sides. His attitude towards his scholars was very different from that which was assumed by many teachers. Instead of being a mere conveyer of scientific information, he was himself "a high priest of science," as one of his pupils declared, supplying precious inspiration, and not merely pointing out the limits of lessons and finding out whether they were known, but making work productively interesting, while neglecting none of the details. His pupils became distinguished engineers, and as this is the period in which the state railroads were being built, there was plenty of opportunity for them to apply the instruction they had received. Not only were the reports of the Royal Commission of Inspection repeated evidence of Ohm's success as a teacher, but the technical schools which were under the care of Ohm's disciples soon came to be recognized as far above the average, and as representing not only the successful teaching of technics on his part, but also the influence that his example as a teacher had in forming others to carry on the work.
How much Ohm was beloved by those who knew him best can be properly appreciated from the following passage from the panegyric delivered in Munich in 1855, not long after his death, by Professor Lamont, who had known him intimately: "Nature," he said, "conferred upon Ohm goodness of heart and unselfishness to an unusual degree. These precious qualities formed the groundwork of all his intercourse with his fellows. Despite the underlying strength of his character, which kept him faithfully at work during all his career, whenever there was question of merely personal advantage to himself, he preferred to yield to pressure from without, rather than rouse himself to resistance, and he thus avoided all bitterness in life. The unfortunate events which forced him, during the early part of his career, from an advantageous position back into private life, did not produce any misanthropic feelings in him, and when later a brilliant recognition gave him that rank in the world of science which by right belonged to him, his simplicity of conduct was not in any way modified, nor was the modesty of his disposition at all altered." In a word, Ohm was one of those rare geniuses whose magnanimity placed him above the vicissitudes of fortune. His power to do original work was not disturbed by the opposition which a really new discoverer invariably meets, but his unfailing equanimity was just as little exalted into conceit and pretentiousness by the praise which so justly came to him once the real significance of his scientific work dawned upon the world.
With the realization of all that Ohm's Work meant in the department of electricity, it is easy to understand how his name deserves a place in the science for all time. In order permanently to honor his memory, the International Congress of Electricians, which met at Paris in 1881, confirmed the action of the British Association of 1861, by giving the name ohm to the unit of electrical resistance. This is an ideal monument to the great worker. It is as simple and modest a reward as even he would have wished, expressing as it does, the gratitude of succeeding generations of scientists for all time.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Ohm's brother, Martin Ohm, deserves a passing word, because his life is characteristically different in certain ways and because, above all, it represents academic success, while Ohm's was almost an academic failure. He finally received the professorship in mathematics at Berlin, and came to be considered as one of the greatest professors of the subject in Europe. Their careers form typical examples of the fact, often notable in history, that talent finds a ready welcome in the academic world, while genius is often neglected, and indeed may be, and often is, the target for bitter opposition. The younger Ohm's writings are mainly with regard to mathematics, but nearly always from some general rather than special standpoint, and very often with regard to the educational side of the subject. His first book was on Analytic and Higher Geometry in their Elements. He then wrote class text-books of mathematics and mechanics. One of his works, The Spirit of Mathematical Analysis and its Relation to a Logical System, because of its value as an educational document attracted widespread attention. This book, translated by Ellis into English, was published in London in 1845. One of Martin Ohm's earlier books should be of special interest to educators because of its subject. Its rather lengthy title is, "An Attempt to Formulate a Short, Fundamental, Clear Method to Enable Those without a Taste for Mathematics to Learn the Mathematics Necessary for the Higher and Technical Schools."
[24] Fordham University Press, 1907.