 This last point, according to Pierre Weiss, Weber’s obituarist and successor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, as the Zurich Polytechnic came to be called after 1911, was “the mainspring of his [Weber’s] life, the source of his most beautiful successes” (Weiss 1912, p. 44).Weber received his doctorate under Abbe in 1865 with a dissertation on the theory of light diffraction.He spent the second half of the 1860s as a private tutor in Pforzheim, publishing only one article during this period.