As the son of a poor spinning overseer in a mill at Eisenach, [Ernst] had seen the degenerating effect on his father and others of fourteen to sixteen hours of daily toil accompanied by low wages, miserable surroundings, poor food, neglect of family life and education.

His childhood was one of privation, his father worked on his feet 16 hours every day with no breaks for meals. Ernst, however, won scholarships and was helped through his studies by his father's employer.

He hid them in a long, narrow room inside the mill, which could not be easily found and which he had only discovered a year or two earlier. During the repeated house searches, Ernst had to give the refugees appropriate signs to keep them calm. One of them was a leading revolutionary who had to stay for a long time because he was wounded. When the day for his departure came, Ernst had to take him to a remote place that night, where a wagon was waiting for him to continue his journey. This avoided the risk of suspicion if the father had been seen with the stranger and he had been recognised ...

... never quite overcame aversion to Prussia and its state character and, in contrast, increased local patriotism for the Thuringian states in general and Saxony-Weimar in particular.

Abbe's work would be particularly satisfactory for the competent faculty member, although Abbe is only a student in his third semester and is in no way supported by external means. His teachers assure me that he was undoubtedly born to become a professional scientist.

The housing and living conditions in Göttingen were noticeably more expensive than those in Jena, but, apart from scholarships, he managed to acquire the necessary larger funds partly through private lessons to domestic and foreign students, and partly through solving prize problems.

O B Sheynin has recently called attention to a most remarkable paper by Ernst Abbe, presented in 1863, in which Abbe derives not only the $c^{2}$ distribution, but R L Anderson's (1942) distribution of the serial correlation coefficient. ... The paper is a superbly competent piece of work and perhaps the most remarkable anticipation of later studies of distribution theory that have yet come to light.

In 1863, Abbe habilitated at Jena (with a study of error distribution in experimental data and the method of least squares) and so became a Privatdocent there. His lectures, at least in his first years, were usually attended by only one or two students, and by never more than a dozen; he was a poor lecturer. Though he initially taught several different types of courses in both mathematics and physics, he later came to limit his lecturing to particular aspects of optics. His laboratory course in experimental physics, by contrast, proved more successful; during various semesters he attracted around seventeen students. During his first years of teaching, Abbe had only the most primitive, outdated instruments at his and his students' disposal; and his so-called laboratory was, in fact, a mere shed, which served until 1880 when it collapsed during the course of a visit by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel! The material problems of teaching experimental physics at Jena only added to Abbe's burden of a heavy teaching load. In a letter of 1863 to his close friend Harald Schütz, he discussed his course on the theory of measuring instruments and in so doing revealed the handicaps of teaching physics at Jena:

"But then came the experiments. At first I scarcely reckoned with them because the physical cabinet has almost no noteworthy measuring instruments with which I could have demonstrated. I soon saw, however, that a theory of measuring instruments, one so completely abstract and without accompanying demonstrations of the apparatus described and without practical exercises, is something damned boring, and that I would earn little approval for my lecture course if I could not join practical demonstrations to it. ... Day after day I have thus had to worry about the work of constructing or having constructed new demonstration apparatus. Moreover, this needs to be done as quickly as possible if it is to fit into my current lecture course. ... You've never been concerned with physical experiments and so you have no idea of the time and trouble it costs when one is supposed to put together a tolerable piece of apparatus with such inadequate resources and with one's own hands."

With simple resources, it enables the microscope to be used for spectroscopic observations; it represents a significant improvement on an older construction of the same type. Without going into the details, one thing should be noted: namely, that the report on this apparatus made in 1870 was Abbe's first publication in Jena; and at the same time that the device is the first real new construction produced by the Zeiss workshops on the basis of Abbe's ideas.

One year after beginning the manufacture of the Carl Zeiss compound microscope, in 1873, Herr Abbe released a scientific paper describing the mathematics leading to the perfection of this wonderful invention. For the first time in optical design, aberration, diffraction and coma were described and understood. Abbe described the optical process so well that this paper has become the foundation upon which much of our understanding of optical science rests today. As a reward for his efforts Carl Zeiss made Abbe a partner in his burgeoning business in 1876.

This foundation established a new group as the owners of Carl Zeiss. The greater portion of the assets were deeded to the University of Jena, whose Department of Education managed the universities interests. This authority was bound by a set of statutes drawn up by Abbe himself, after studying sociology and law for two years. The balance of the estate was donated to the employees of Carl Zeiss.

"Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep, eight hours to be a human being," was the slogan under which Ernst Abbe introduced the eight-hour-day in the Zeiss Optical Factory in Jena, Germany in 1900. Abbe, the founder of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, was a social reformer and philanthropist. He recognised early the fact that, even under very favourable social and working conditions like those established at his factory, the working man was still mostly a worker, very little a man, a human being. Even highly qualified work of mechanical precision had to undergo more and more the specialisation process of division of labour and mechanisation. To be a human being was considered by Ernst Abbe as a rightful demand of the industrial worker; ...

Abbe studied the effects of mechanisation of labour which separated the workers from their tools and the development of corporations which separated ownership and control. The result of his research proved loss in the individual's pride in his work, loss of traditional human relations between master and worker and between fellow workers. In his factory he introduced a good and stable minimum salary guaranteed to every worker, which was increased by (a) a supplement according to the individual output as a production bonus and (b) a Christmas bonus signifying a sharing in the profits of the enterprise. The right to a pension was attached to the basic salary. A housing project was established, not owned by the factory but by a co-operative agency of the workers. The factory foundation, together with the University and the city of Jena, set up a variety of educational and recreational facilities that assured the workers pleasant social conditions and an extremely high standard of living. A workers' committee served as an example of workers' rights for German labour legislation. Foreseeing the bad effects of mechanisation of industry, Abbe suggested to other employers and to the State that a substantial part of industrial profit should be used to improve the economic and social conditions of the workers; greater security should be given by a pension and profit sharing plan, and by severance pay; workers' committees should establish greater social recognition and participation in management responsibility.

On June 30, 1911, was dedicated the Ernst Abbe Memorial. The American Microscopical Society as one of the prominent contributors to the undertaking was invited to send representatives, but owing to the shortness of the time could not be represented. The monument was designed by Henry Van de Velde and adorned with reliefs of Constantin Mennier; it also contained the marble bust of Abbe which is the work of Max Klinger. The structure is a noble memorial to one to whom we owe primarily the greatest improvements in the effectiveness of the microscope as an instrument of research, which have been added to it for more than a century.

The Carl Zeiss Foundation in Jena occasionally announced to the German Mathematicians and Physicists Conference in Jena (September 1921) the foundation of an Ernst Abbe Memorial Prize to promote the mathematical and physical sciences and their areas of application. Every two years the interest of 100,000 marks for outstanding achievements in the above-mentioned areas is to be awarded according to the proposals of specialist committees. However, this amount due can be increased in each individual case by a special resolution of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, since the provision is made that the capital itself can be used up over the years. An Ernst Abbe Memorial Medal is to be added to the award, which shows the portrait of Abbe, the founder of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, on the one hand, and the merit of the recipient on the other.