Historical Context, Scientific Context, and Translation of Haidinger's (1844) Discovery of Naked-Eye Visibility of the Polarization of Light

Abstract

In 1844, the Austrian mineralogist Wilhelm von Haidinger reported he could see the polarization of light with the naked eye. It appears as a faint, blurry, transient, yellow hourglass shape superimposed on whatever one looks at. It is now commonly called Haidinger's brushes. To our surprise, even though the paper is well cited, we were unable to find a translation of it from its difficult, nineteenth-century German into English. We provide one, with annotations to set the paper into its scientific and historical context.