Adolf Slaby (1849-1913)

Adolf Carl Heinrich Slaby was born on 18 April 1849 in Berlin, the son of a bookbinder. Having finished school, he studied at the Berliner Gewerbeakademie engineering from 1869 to 1873. He went on to take a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Jena.

In 1873 Slaby took up a position at the Königliche Provinzial-Gewerbeschule (Royal Regional Technical Academy) in Potsdam, where he taught mathematics and mechanics. At the same time he started on extremely practically-oriented papers in the field of mechanical engineering, concentrating particularly on electrical engineering. In 1876 he became professor at the Gewerbeakademie for Theoretical Mechanics. He became a co-founder of the Berlin Society of Electrical Engineering in 1879. In 1882 Slaby became professor of Theoretical Mechanics and Electrical Engineering at the TH Berlin. Two years later he took over the building and directorship of the electrical engineering laboratory at the TH.

Slaby's high public profile was largely due to his rhetorical skills and his ability to explain complicated technical ideas to lay audiences. He came to the attention of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) in 1893, after he had submitted a successful proposal to alter the electrical lighting in the White Room of the royal palace in Berlin. As a result of this, Slaby became the monarch's personal advisor on technical matters. Wilhelm II regularly turned up, sometimes with a retinue of military, naval and ministerial personnel, at Slaby's experiment-lectures at the TH. From the mid-1890s on, Slaby worked almost exclusively on wireless telegraphy. He travelled to Great Britain in 1897 to take part in the radio trials being carried out by Guglielmo Marchese Marconi (1874-1937). On his return to Berlin, Slaby made a reconstruction of Marconi's device and, together with his assistant Georg Graf von Arco (1869-1940), developed it further. In 1898 Georg Graf von Arco became an engineer at AEG, which marked the start of Slaby's collaboration with AEG on the industrial realisation of radio telegraphy.

Slaby was involved in a broad range of activities associated with professional and specialist organisations in the field of technology. He co-founded the German Association of Electrical Engineers and he served as the body's first chairman. He also headed the German Association of Engineers between 1906 and 1908. He was the rector of the TH Berlin in 1894/95 and he played an important role in the preparation of a congress of all German Technische Hochschulen in Eisenach, where the participants renewed the call for parity of status between degrees from traditional universities and from Technische Hochschulen. It was in large measure due to Slaby's influence that Wilhelm II granted degree-conferring status to the three Technische Hochschulen in Prussia on the occasion of the centenary of the TH Berlin in 1899. Slaby's services to the recognition of the engineering profession were recognised by the presentation of the Grashof Medal by the German Association of Engineers.

In 1898 Wilhelm II named Slaby a lifetime member of the royal household. Slaby was also a member of the Technical Deputation for Industry and a member of the patent office. In 1912, he retired from professional and public duties for health reasons and died in Berlin on 6 April 1913.

Lit.: Karl-Heinz Manegold: Adolf Slaby, in W. Treue u. W. König: Berlinische Lebensbilder Bd. 6 - Techniker, Berlin: Colloquium Verlag 1990

[J. Z.]