Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Vienna, Austria
About Erwin Saxl
- Erwin Joseph Saxl (May 7, 1904 – January 28, 1981) was a physicist and inventor.
- He was born in Vienna in 1904 and received his Ph.D.
- there in 1927.
- In the late 1920s he emigrated to the United States.
- In 1935 he founded the Saxl Instrument Company, which designed and manufactured tension meters for use in the textile industry, and later in other industries.
- The company, which Saxl ran jointly with his wife, Lucretia Hildreth Saxl, from their home in Harvard, Massachusetts, was renamed Tensitron in 1953.
- Saxl is reported as having stated that he worked under Albert Einstein.
- He died in 1981.Saxl is most well known for a series of controversial experiments in which he measured unexpected changes in the period of a torsion pendulum under various conditions.
- In one series of experiments, the period of a torsion pendulum situated inside a Faraday cage, with the pendulum and the cage connected by a conducting path, was observed to increase as the voltage on the cage was increased.
- In another experiment, the period of the pendulum was seen to increase during an eclipse.
- Saxl is reported to have attempted, without success, to get this work published in the Physical Review; eventually the work was published in Nature.In the early 1960s, Saxl began a collaboration with Mildred Allen of Mount Holyoke College.
- In 1971, Saxl and Allen published a report of anomalous changes in the period of a torsion pendulum during a solar eclipse in 1970 and hypothesized that “gravitational theory needs to be modified”.
- In addition, they observed unexplained diurnal variation in the period of the pendulum.
- None of the effects observed by Saxl and Allen have obvious explanations in terms of well-established theories of gravity and electromagnetism.
- Although more subtle explanations, still using conventional physical theory, have been proffered there does not appear to be general agreement as to the cause of the anomalies.
- Saxl and Allen's claim that general relativity must be modified, and earlier claims of a similar nature by Allais based on observations of anomalies in the behaviour of a paraconical pendulum, have not won acceptance by the physics community, and recent attempts to reproduce the phenomena have not been successful.
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