Herbert Fröhlich was born in the Black Forest town of Rexingen on 9th December 1905, and, after a brief period in commerce upon leaving school at the age of 15, entered the University of Munich as an undergraduate in 1927. There, under Sommerfeld’s direction, he obtained his D.Phil (for a thesis on the Photoelectric Effect in Metals) after only 3 years, and without ever having taken a first degree! With the rise of Nazism, however, he was soon dismissed from his first post in Freiburg – where he was Privatdozent responsible for introducing modern physics – and in 1933 left Germany for Russia, to work (at Frenkel’s invitation), as a ‘Foreign Expert’, in Joffe’s Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). There he became acquainted with current work on semiconductors, and included a discussion of them in his now famous book, Elektronentheorie der Metalle (Springer, 1936, 1969). Being for some years the only textbook to contain a treatment of semiconductors, it later proved very influential when the technological potential of these materials started to be appreciated, particularly in the USA, where it was reprinted, un-translated, in 1943.
After only 2 years, the political situation in Russia forced him to flee again, and eventually, in 1935, he found himself in England – in Mott’s department at the University of Bristol. Apart from a short stay in Holland in 1937, and a period of internment during the War, he remained in Bristol until 1948, rising to the position of Reader. Then, at Chadwick’s instigation, he took up the first Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool. This he held with great distinction until his retirement in 1973, after which he was Professor Emeritus from 1976 until his death on 23rd January 1991, at the age of 85. Between 1973 and 1976, he was Professor of Solid State Electronics at the University of Salford, during which time he still maintained an office in Liverpool, spending there a total of 43 years.
He was Professor of Solid State Theory of Electro-Magnetics at the University of Stuttgart until his death.Text taken from International Insitute of Biophysics.
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