For several decades Walter Kertz, who was the first who held the chair of geophysics and meteorology at the university in Brunswick and founder of the institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics, collected and arranged historical and biographical material about the development of Geophyics as a physical discipline and about known and interesting geophysicists as well as scientists which were closely connected to Geophysics. Walter Kertz managed to formulate the majority of this material in a well readable book about the History of Geophysics and a remarkable collection of biographies.
From his estate his wife Ruth Kertz (1924-2010) and his successor Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier processed the available material. The history of Geophysics could already be published in 1999 as a book at the Olms-Verlag (Hildesheim).
The "Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte der Geophysik" (Biographical encyclopaedia to the history of Geophysics) was published in 2002 by the "Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft". It contains short biographies of over 300 scientists. This collection provides extensive additional information to the 1990 published History of Geophysics.
Those who knew Walter Kertz know that it wasn't his intention to present important personalities as heroes but to revive them once more on the stage of Geophysic's history for younger people. All biographies can be found here .
This site also wants to advert to other interesting work about the history of Geophysics as for example the open access journal History of Geophysics and Space Science.
An overview of the history of the institute is summarized here (German).
It includes contributions from the following professors who have taught and researched at the IGEP: Prof. Dr. Heinrich Koppe, Prof. Dr. Ulf Amleung, Prof. Dr. Walter Kertz, Prof. Dr. Ludwig Engelhard, Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Glassmeier.
The Braunschweig educator Karl Almstedt was a co-founder of the German Geophysical Society. Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier recalls the researcher in an article and the TU magazine reported.
