Maximilien Topler was a German physicist known for his work on electrostatics

Electrostatics

Electrostatics is the branch of physics that deals with the phenomena and properties of stationary or slow-moving electric charges....

, sparks and Schlieren photography

Schlieren photography

Schlieren photography is a visual process that is used to photograph the flow of fluids of varying density. Invented by the German physicist August Toepler in 1864 to study supersonic motion, it is widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects...

. His father was the physicist August Toepler

August Toepler

August Joseph Ignaz Toepler was a German physicist known for his experiments in electrostatics. In 1864 he applied Foucault's knife-edge test for telescope mirrors to the analysis of fluid flow and the shock wave. He named this new method schlieren photography, for which he is justifiably famous...

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Toepler's law (1906) states that the resistance of an electric arc at any time is inversely proportional to the charge which has flowed through the arc:


where I(t) is the current in the arc discharge at time t, and D is the gap between the electrodes. The parameter is a constant whose value is .