Franck, James, 1882-1964

James Franck was born August 26, 1882 in Hamburg, Germany, where his Sephardic Jewish forebears had lived for over two hundred years [Box 20, folder 58 and Box 21, folder 1]. His father, Jacob Franck, was a banker who wanted his son to follow a business career in keeping with family tradition. From childhood on, however, James could imagine no other life but science. An X-ray photograph illustrates his fascination with new discoveries in physics. He had already read of Roentgen's X-ray photography when he broke his arm in 1896. A mere boy of thirteen, he went alone to a municipal physics laboratory for a demonstration of Roentgen's discovery on his broken arm, which he later proudly recalled was the first use of X-ray in Hamburg [Box 21, folder 9]. Despite these scientific interests, Franck was considered a very dull schoolboy, for success within the curriculum of the classical gymnasium depended on one of his weakest faculties, rote memory.

In his first year of studies at Heidelberg, 1901, Franck met Max Born and others who shared his love of science. Born helped him persuade his parents to let him study physics, although at that time a scientific career offered little financial security. In 1902, he went to Berlin to study at the Friedrich Whilhelm University with some of Germany's most famous physicists, including Max Planck, whose formulation of the quantum in 1900 had given the new mechanics its names, and Emil Warburg, who became his thesis advisor. Among the remains from his student days are his notes of Planck's lectures, entitled "Mechanik nach Planck." [Box 11, folders 1 and 3 (Notebook 2).}

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