Philipp Lenard was born in 1862, Bratislava, in Austria-Hungary (today Slovakia). He studied physics successively at Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Heidelberg, and received his Ph.D. at Heidelberg in 1886. After serving as professor at the universities of Kiel (1898-1907) and Heidelberg (1896-98, 1907-31), he headed the Philipp Lenard Institute at Heidelberg.
Lenard was the first to cause cathode rays to pass from the interior of a vacuum tube through a thin metal window into the air, where they produce luminosity. Lenard received the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in this field. He is noted also for his work on the structure of the atom and for the discovery in 1902, in connection with the photoelectric effect, that the velocity of electrons is independent of the intensity of the light that emits them.
Information as of 1932