Virgil Klatt
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* Timisoara, August 30, 1850 – † Bratislava, January 22, 1935 / experimental physicist, high school teacher ; ; He moved to Bratislava as a child, where he graduated from the high school in German in 1868. Between 1868 and 1871, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna, and when he returned to the high school as a lecturer after obtaining his teaching diploma, the language of instruction was already Hungarian. He was probably the first in the country to set up a workshop for interested students next to the physics laboratory, where he experimented with them. During his research, he first dealt with spectral analysis and resonance, and then his interest turned to the phenomenon of photoluminescence. He published his studies on this from 1889 onwards. Among his students, Fülöp Lénárd, who graduated in 1880 and later won the Nobel Prize, stood out. He returned to his dear teacher in the summers for about two decades to study the properties of the “alkaline earth phosphorus” together. Klatt Virgil Román’s son, who graduated in 1897 at the school where his father taught, was also involved in these studies. They later published several studies about their results together in the journal Annalen der Physik, and the experiments with phosphorus compounds were also summarized in a paper in Hungarian (Fülöp Lenard and Virgil Klatt: Földalkaliphosphorokról, Math. és Term., Tud. Ért. 1904). In his memoirs published in the Bratislava newspaper Grenzbote on the occasion of the death of his former teacher, the famous student describes that Virgil Klatt was a true handyman, he even repaired the pocket watches of his fellow teachers. He described the experiments and observations he conducted in the physics laboratory as preliminary work on the observations of Becquerel, Rutherford, and Röntgen. Klatt's fortunes took a turn for the worse after the change of empire in 1918, and he did not receive a pension for years. He worked in the workshop of one of his students and repaired clocks, until his claim to a pension was recognized in 1924.