Switzerland must have seemed like paradise to him. After one and a half years in POW camp in Germany, Jean Chopin, a twenty-five-year-old French infantryman, was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland in the spring of 1916. Finally, after an interruption of almost three years, he was able to take up his academic studies again in the autumn of 1917.
ETH ZURICH UNIVERSITY ARCHIVE
Ermordung eines Privatdozenten – Zum 25. Todestag von Hermann Burger (1942-1989)
Wolfram Schöllkopf, Privatdozent für Glaziologie und deutsche Literatur an der Eidgenössischen Technischen Universität, flieht aus der Sitzung der Freifächerfakultät, der Abteilung 13 für Geistes- und Militärwissenschaften.
A century of sunspots on 28,000 sheets
Sunspots are patches on the sun’s surface which, at around 4,000°C, are considerably colder than their surroundings. They are formed by disturbances in the sun’s magnetic field.
In search of black gold – Swiss petroleum geologists and the nationalisation of crude oil in Iran
After the Second World War, in the early days of the Cold War, Iran gradually began to break away from the geopolitical power games and economic greed of the major powers, which had especially set their sights on Iranian crude oil. At the end of 1949, the Iranian government founded Iran Oil Co. (Sherkat Sahami Naft Iran), an autonomous state-owned company.
In the land of pyramids and mosques. The Swiss civil engineer Charles Andreae in Egypt
After the Kingdom of Egypt had formally achieved independence in 1922, the Egyptian government tried to suppress British influence in the country. In 1928, as part of these efforts, in 1928 the government requested the Swiss Federal Council to send an ETH professor
How much Switzerland is there in San Francisco? – structural engineer O. H. Ammann and the Golden Gate Bridge
It is a well known story that Swiss-born Johann August Sutter founded a colony by the name of New Helvetia in California in the mid-19th century. It is less well known that another Swiss citizen was essential to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco’s famous landmark that celebrated its 75th birthday in 2012.
“Hallelujah!” – Albert Einstein’s cry of joy on 2nd February 1912
Undoubtedly, the exclamation was an expression of Albert Einstein’s joy regarding his return to his alma mater. He had studied mathematics and physics at the Federal Polytechnic School (now ETH Zurich) from 1896 to 1900, where he obtained a teaching diploma. However, it is fair to speculate that his appointment as a full professor of theoretical physics also triggered a sense of
Carl Gustav Jung: the red book before The Red Book
The Red Book, a red leather-bound document by Carl Gustav Jung about his long-term process of self-discovery following a series of professional and personal set-backs, such as the estrangement from his teacher Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), was not publicly accessible until its publication in
Lifting off like a pelican? The SB-2 Pelikan aircraft and its rusty start
During the Second World War, the Swiss government actively included ETH Zurich in its plans to promote an autonomous national aviation industry in Switzerland. The Federal Office of Aviation (now the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA)) commissioned Professor Eduard