Wander Johannes de Haas

• 1. Introduction

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  Wander Johannes de Haas was born on the 2nd of March 1878 in Lisse, a small town near Leiden in the Netherlands. He would go on to attach his name to three distinct physics effects, each one now carrying the weight of a life spent probing the hidden behavior of matter at extreme cold. Three separate phenomena bear his name: the Shubnikov-de Haas effect, the De Haas-Van Alphen effect, and the Einstein-de Haas effect. What kind of path leads a young man from paralegal studies in Middelburg to collaborating with Albert Einstein? And how does someone who once worked in a lawyer's office end up running one of the most celebrated low-temperature physics laboratories in the world?

• 2. An Unlikely Path to Physics

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  In 1895, de Haas began paralegal studies, following a practical course that seemed to point toward law. He completed two of the three required examination sections and spent time working in a lawyer's office. Then he stopped. He chose physics instead, which meant going back to qualifying exams before he could even apply to a university. He passed them, and in 1900 he enrolled at the University of Leiden to study physics under two leading figures: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes Petrus Kuenen. His doctorate came in 1912, supervised by Kamerlingh Onnes, and his thesis focused on measuring the compressibility of hydrogen. That early work on a simple gas under pressure would prove to be just the beginning of a career built around understanding matter in unusual conditions.

• 3. Family and the Lorentz Connection

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  On the 22nd of December 1910, de Haas married Geertruida Luberta Lorentz, a physicist and the eldest daughter of Hendrik Lorentz, one of the towering figures in Dutch science. The marriage brought de Haas into direct familial contact with a physicist whose theoretical work on the electron had already shaped the field he was entering. Together they had two daughters and two sons. De Haas was an atheist, a fact recorded matter-of-factly alongside the rest of his biography. His wife's own scientific background meant theirs was a household shaped by physics from more than one direction.

• 4. From Berlin to Leiden

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  After completing his doctorate, de Haas moved to Berlin to work as a researcher at the Physikalische Reichsanstalt, the German national institute for science and technology. Returning to the Netherlands, he took on a series of quite different roles: schoolteacher in Deventer, then conservator at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, then professor at the Delft Technical School and at the University of Groningen. In 1925, Leiden called him back. He became a professor there and one of the two heads of the physics laboratory, succeeding Kamerlingh Onnes, the man who had supervised his doctoral work. An electromagnet from around 1930, representative of the equipment used in his low-temperature research, can still be seen at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden.

• 5. Membership, War, and Return

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  In 1922, de Haas was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Twenty years later, in 1942, he was forced to resign. The war had reached Dutch institutions, and de Haas was among those removed from membership under the German occupation. When the war ended in 1945, he was permitted to rejoin. He retired in 1948, three years after the Academy restored him. He died on the 26th of April 1960, having spent the final years of his life in a Netherlands that had reassembled itself from occupation and reconstruction. His name remains attached to three physical phenomena that researchers in condensed matter physics still encounter today.