HESS, Victor Franz

After graduation in Graz (1901), H., who was a son of the forester in Prince service Vinzenz H. (1842-1917) and Franziska Soraphice Marianne von Grossbauer-Waldstätt (1841-1913) studied at the Graz University (1901-1905), where he graduated in 1906 with sub auspiciis imperatoris . After the suicide of Paulo Drudes, H. began his career in science at his Berlin institute. In the same year his teacher Leopold von Pfaundler gave him the job at the II. Physics Institute of the University of Vienna. He participated in the study of at the time poorly explored areas of atmospheric electricity and radioactivity with Franzen Exner and Egon von Schweidler. In 1907 he began his teaching career as a half-time demonstrator at the Mineralogical Institute of the University of Vienna and in 1908 became a part-time lecturer in medical physics at the Vienna Veterinary University (until 1920). In 1910 he habilitated as a private docent at the University of Vienna and, after having completed his work at the Physical institute, became the assistant under Stefan Meyer at the newly established Institute of Radium Research of the Viennese Academy of Sciences.
Encouraged by the successful preparatory work, especially those made together with the Swiss Albert Gockl, H. in 1911/12 with the support of the Austrian Academy of Sciences studied specific changes in air ionization, which he observed from air balloons. The measurements results - reduction of ionization up to 1,000 m above sea level and its subsequent triple value increase up to approximately about 5,000 m. The interpretation that this is the cause of the alien, cosmic (gamma-) rays, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Carl David Anderson (for the discovery of positron).
While working at the Institute of Radium Research, H. was also concerned with heat rays of radium, the number of alpha particles, which could be obtained from one gram of radium and with counting the gamma rays. To be able to do that, he together with an Englishman who worked with him at the institute made a device – a forerunner of Geiger-Muller’s counter. During these years he was also heavily burnt by radium and lost his left thumb in 1930s, after which he began to deal with the problems of radiation protection and medical radiology. In 1919/20 dominate the works on the ionic wind.
In 1919 he received the title of associate professor at Vienna University, a year later accepted the invitation of the University of Graz, where he was appointed the Ordinary Professor of Experimental Physics at the Institute of Hans Benndorf but soon took a leave of absence in order to work as principal physicist at the US Radium Corporation in East Orange, New Jersey, where he built a laboratory and later became its Head.
He also lectured at Columbia University. In 1925 H. was appointed Ordinary Professor of Experimental Physics in Graz, where he dealt with a new study of the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere and cosmic rays, whose value was put into question by Robert Andrews Millikan, who in 1923 received the Nobel Prize. H. and his colleagues also conducted measurements on Sonnblick (3,100 m) and Helgoland. In 1929 he refused an offer of employment in the American Peking Union Medical College and was elected Dean of the Faculty of philosophy at the university. Two years later, however, he accepted the offer the University of Innsbruck which appointed him Professor and Director of Institute of Radiology. He built a cableway to Hafelekar (Karwendel mountain chain) nearby and at a height of 2300 m. above sea-level established the observation and research outpost. There H. worked with ionization chambers and mist chambers, as well as the new metres. He was also engaged in the explanation of cosmic rays and together with his colleagues developed a "clean nuclear plate" micrograined, silver-coated photographic plate on which the silver atoms are broken due to incident beam particles, which was a new method for their demonstration.
For his work H. received support from the Austrian and Prussian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Ministry of education, the Association for the Development of German Science and the American Rockefeller Foundation.
From 1933 he was a correspondent member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was in 1937 employed at the Graz Institute of Physics as the successor to Hans Benndorf but took the post only at the request of the Minister of Education Hans Pernter as he left Innsbruck with a heavy heart. From its establishment (1934) to the dissolution (1938), he was also a member of the Austrian Federal Council for Culture. The Nazi takeover in Austria brought about forced retirement to this Catholic cosmopolitan who was married to Jewess and also had a Jewish grandmother. Following an invitation to the USA, where he could travel only after the Nobel grant in Sweden, the authorities dismissed H. without the possibility of yielding a pension (in 1955 the Republic of Austria returned his pension from the year 1950 on).
In November 1938 he began to teach at a Jesuit university in Fordham, New York where he lectured on atomic and nuclear physics, cosmic radiation and meteorology, as well as on atmospheric electricity. He resigned in 1956. His publications from the USA period primarily dealt with the ionization of the atmosphere near the globe, air travelling, radioactive substances contained in soil and rocks and cosmic radiation. H’s scientific opus consists of about 170 works.
H., who in 1944 declined an invitation to the Dublin Institute of advanced studies and left this post to his colleague Erwin →Schrödinger, the same year became a USA citizen and from 1945 repeatedly travelled to Austria. The political situation there was considered too dangerous and he would visit Austria only to host lectures.
H. in 1919 received a Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in 1932 Abbe Medal of the Carl Zeiss institution in Jena, Abbe Memorial Prize and in 1958 he received the Fordham University Medal of Merit. Vienna Veterinary University awarded him with an honorary doctorate in 1937, the Fordham University in 1946, Loyola University from Chicago in 1956 and finally the University of Innsbruck in 1958. In addition, H. became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1961. He first married in 1920 to significantly older widow of an officer, named Berta Breisky born Wärmer (1868-1955), who had a son and daughter from a previous marriage. In 1955 he married for the second time with his housekeeper Elisabeth Buchheim. He did not have any children of his own.
Due to the discovery and research on high altitude cosmic radiation H. is regarded one of the founders of modern physics.