Erwin Finlay Freundlich

Erwin Finlay Freundlich (1885-1964) was the son of a German businessman and his British wife. (Finlay Freundlich only called himself 'Finlay' after he came to live in Scotland, being known as Erwin Freundlich for the first fifty years of his life). He was born in Biebrich and educated in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1903 Freundlich completed his school education and went to work in the dockyards in Stettin. He entered the Technische Hochschule of Charlottenburg and began a course of study in naval architecture. Ill-health forced him to change his plans and he entered the University of Gttingen to study mathematics, physics and astronomy.

Freundlich was awarded a doctorate by the University of Gttingen for a thesis on analytic function theory in 1910. Klein suggested to Freundlich that he might wish to apply for a post as an assistant at the Royal Observatory in Berlin and his appointment was confirmed on 1 July 1910. Freundlich worked with Einstein in 1911 attempting to make the measurements of Mercury's orbit required to confirm the general theory of relativity. He confirmed it in a paper of 1913 but Freundlich had to go against the wishes of the Director of the Berlin Observatory who strongly advised him against publishing such a revolutionary idea. His plans for an expedition to the Crimea funded by Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach were made impossible by the outbreak of World War I. He wrote his first book in 1916 following Einstein's publication of the general theory of relativity. Freundlich's book Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Gravitationstheorie discussed the ways that the general theory of relativity could be tested by astronomical observations.

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