Ernst Lecher

Ernst Lecher (1 June 1856 – 19 July 1926) was an Austrian physicist who, from 1909, was head of the First Institute of Physics^[1] in Vienna. He is remembered for developing an apparatus— "Lecher lines"—to measure the wavelength and frequency of electromagnetic waves.^[2] He gave his name to the Ernst-Lecher-Institut, a radar research establishment set up in the 1940s in Reichenau, south of Vienna,^[3] which is now a part of the German research institute Max Planck Institute.

Lecher's father, Zacharias K Lecher,^[4] was editor of Vienna's leading daily newspaper, Die Presse, and helped to publicise the discovery of X-rays of his German colleague Wilhelm Röntgen in 1896. Lecher's nephew, Konrad Zacharias Lorenz, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.^[5]