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486 [743] CHARDONNET MAXIM
of central Asia and its influence on world weather patterns. He also gathered and recorded nu merous species of plants and animals, several hundred of them being new to science. His best-known discovery was that of a wild horse, the last remaining wild subspecies of that animal; one that is now called Przhevalsky’s horse in his honor. He also discovered a wild camel. He died of typhus on his fifth expedi tion (through the unguarded drinking of river water) and was buried on the shores of Lake Issyk Kul in what is now Soviet territory near the Sinkiang border. [743] CHARDONNET, Louis Marie Hilaire Bemigaud, comte de (shahr-doh-nayO French chemist Born: Besançon, Doubs, May 1, 1839
Died: Paris, March 12, 1924 In the later stages of his education Chardonnet worked as an assistant to Pasteur [642], who was investigating silkworm diseases. Chardonnet’s interest in fibers was roused. Later, he worked on guncotton for the French Govern ment.
Since he was independently wealthy, he could devote himself freely to work of his own choosing, and he chose to com bine these two interests. He began, in 1878, to produce fibers by forcing solu tions of nitrocellulose through tiny holes and allowing the solvent to evaporate. In 1884 he obtained a patent for the pro cess, as Swan [677] had done the year before in England. At the Paris Exposition of 1891 “Chardonnet silk” was a sensation. It was called rayon, since it was so shiny that it seemed to give forth rays of light. The nitrocellulose used was not fully ni trated so that it was not explosive. Nev ertheless, rayon was at first so dan gerously inflammable that it came to be called “mother-in-law silk” because (the grisly joke went) a rayon dress and a lighted match were ideal presents for a mother-in-law. Swan showed how the nitro groups could be removed from the rayon after fiber formation to make the material far less inflammable (though not as strong). Rayon was the first artificial fiber to come into common use. It was only modified cellulose, to be sure, but it pointed the way toward the completely synthetic fibers developed by Carothers [1190] and others a half century later. In 1914 Chardonnet was awarded the Perkin medal for his development of rayon. [744] KUNDT, August Adolph Eduard Eberhard (koont) German physicist Born: Schwerin, Mecklenburg, November 18, 1839 Died: Israelsdorf (near Lübeck), May 21, 1894 Like Helmholtz [631], Kundt (who was educated at the University of Berlin and received his doctor’s degree in 1864) was interested in sound. In 1866 he invented an interesting method for studying the velocity of sound in different gases. He did this by dusting the interior of tubes with a finely divided powder, which was then disturbed by traveling waves. From the pattern of dis turbance Kundt could calculate the ve locity of sound in the material making up the tube or in the gas contained in the tube. In 1888 he succeeded Helmholtz as professor of physics at the Berlin Physi cal Institute. He is best known now, however, as the teacher and sponsor of Roentgen [774], whose great discovery he did not quite live to witness. [745] MAXIM, Sir Hiram Stevens American-English inventor Born: Sangerville, Maine, Febru ary 5, 1840 Died: London, England, Novem ber 24, 1916 Maxim, the son of a farmer, spent his early life apprenticed to various iron works establishments and devised nu merous inventions. His career (which in cluded a period of professional prizefighting) reached one climax when 487 [746] CLEVE
COPE [748] he went to Paris to demonstrate one of his patents at the Paris Exposition in 1881. He received an award for it. Feeling that there was more opportu nity for him in Europe, he went to En gland, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming a British subject in 1900. In 1883 he produced his most impor tant invention, the first fully automatic machine gun. It was an advance over that of Gatling [609] in that it made use of the energy of the recoil of a fired bul let to eject the spent cartridge and load the next. It worked particularly well after the development of smokeless powder, to which he contributed. The British Army adopted the Maxim gun in 1889 and Maxim was knighted in 1901. The use of automatic machine guns gave European armies a still greater ad vantage over native levies in Africa and Asia. One popular jingle of the time went: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun and they have not! It added its peculiar horror to World War I, when both sides had machine guns; its offensive power was not neu tralized till the invention of the tank. Be fore the tank came along, generals let their soldiers be mowed down by the hundreds of thousands before enemy machine guns. Maxim lived just long enough to see that. He was afflicted with a tendency to envy, unfortunately, and begrudged the fame of other inventors, including, par ticularly, Edison [788]. [746] CLEVE, Per Teodor (klay'vuh) Swedish chemist and geologist Born: Stockholm, February 10, 1840
Died: Uppsala, June 18, 1905 Cleve, the thirteenth child of his par ents, studied under Mosander [501] and like him was particularly interested in the rare earth minerals. His doctoral dis sertation was on the subject. He obtained his degree in 1863 and in 1868 received a professorial appointment at the Uni versity of Uppsala. In 1879 he demonstrated the identity of Nilson’s [747] scandium with Mende- léev’s [705] predicted eka-boron, and in the same year discovered two new ele ments among the rare earth minerals, thulium and holmium. He was one of the reviewing board who sat in judgment upon the Ph.D. dis sertation of the young Arrhenius [894] and disapproved. Twenty years later, when he was serving as chairman of the committee that selected winners of the recently established Nobel Prize in chemistry, he helped pick Arrhenius for the prize—for that very same disser tation. Cleve was also interested in biology and explored the microscopic ocean life (plankton) of the North Sea. In fact, when he retired he planned to devote himself to the study of plankton but he died a few months later. [747] NILSON, Lars Fredrik Swedish chemist
1840
Died: Stockholm, May 14, 1899 Nilson’s chief interest in chemistry was in the study of the rare earth minerals, which had been discovered in Sweden by Gadolin [373], In 1879 he discovered that one of the minerals contained a hitherto unknown element, which he named scandium in honor of Scandinavia. It had properties that were exactly like those predicted by Mendeleev [705] for an element he called eka-boron, whose existence he had predicted. This was pointed out by Nil son’s colleague Cleve [746]. In later years Nilson was most notable for his work on chemical fertilizers. [748] COPE, Edward Drinker American paleontologist Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 28, 1840 Died: Philadelphia, April 12, 1897
Cope, who was born of a wealthy fam ily, was educated privately in his youth 488 [749] KRAFFT-EBING KOVALEVSKI
and then attended the University of Pennsylvania. He was quite precocious and was publishing scientific papers while still in his teens. He served as professor of comparative zoology and botany at Haverford Col lege, then went on to do his major work while on the staff at the University of Pennsylvania. His career paralleled that of his mortal enemy Marsh [690], espe cially in the collection of fossils in the western United States and in working out the evolutionary history of the horse. All told, he discovered about a thousand species of extinct vertebrates in the rocks of the United States. Cope was a Quaker and consequently refused to carry a gun during his West ern journeys despite the very real danger from Indians. At one point, surrounded by hostile Indians, he flabbergasted them by taking out his false teeth and putting them back, over and over. When all had had a chance to watch this, they let him go-
In his search for a driving force in ev olution, he retreated nearly to the posi tion of Lamarck [336] and felt that the natural movements of animals helped alter and develop the moving parts. He called this kinetogenesis. In his efforts to beat out Marsh, Cope went to the lengths of trying to telegraph descrip tions of fossils in order to establish prior ity. In the end, both he and Marsh im poverished themselves in their competi tion.
In 1889 the drain on his resources produced by his field trips forced him to retire to mere teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. [749] KRAFFT-EBING, Baron Richard von (krahft ay'bing) German neurologist
14, 1840 Died: Mariagrun, near Graz, Austria, December 22, 1902 Krafft-Ebing began his psychiatric ca reer as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Strasbourg in 1872 and then as director of an insane asylum at Graz. He published a textbook on psychiatry which went through seven editions in his lifetime. His great work, however, and the one for which he is chiefly remem bered today is his study of case histories of sexual abnormality in a book entitled
1886. It is mostly descriptive, but it helped initiate the scientific discussion of sexual abnormality, which was to culmi nate two decades later in Freud’s [865] theories. Krafft-Ebing introduced such terms as “paranoia,” “sadism,” and “masochism.” He served as professor of psychiatry at several Austrian universities, culminating with an appointment at the University of Vienna in 1889 where he remained until his death.
friyevich (koh-va-lev'skee) Russian embryologist
pils), Latvia, November 19, 1840 Died: St. Petersburg (now Lenin grad), November 22, 1901 Like many Russian scholars, Kova- levski, the son of a landowner of Polish descent, received a good German educa tion. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen and received his doctorate in 1867. He then obtained a professorial appointment at the Uni versity of St. Petersburg, teaching later at other schools as well. He was a student of Haeckel [707] and therefore a strong evolutionist. He, more than anyone else, in fact, intro duced Darwinism into Russia. In the 1870s his careful researches bridged the gap between vertebrates and inverte brates. In the first place he studied em bryonic development intensively (follow ing Haeckel’s belief that the embryo fol lows the line of evolution), searching for similarities across the wide gaps dividing the main groups of creatures. Thus, Remak [591] had shown that vertebrate embryos developed three germ layers, each one of which gave rise to a specific group of organs. Kovalevski was able to show that these same three germ 489 [751] AMAGAT
DUTTON [753] layers also appeared among invertebrates as well. Furthermore, he studied such nonver tebrates as amphioxus and tunicates and showed that the former possessed a no tochord and the latter did so at least in its larval stage. A larval notochord was also to be found in the balanoglossus, or acorn worm. Vertebrates possess no tochords in the embryonic stage and so Kovalevski suggested the existence of a phylum that consists largely but not en tirely of the vertebrates and that also in cludes related invertebrate forms. Bal four [823], who made the same sugges tion independently, suggested the name Chordata for the phylum in question. Thus another sharp dividing line was broken down and a further impulse was given to the concept of life as a basic unit, differentiated into grander and smaller divisions and subdivisions by slow change over the eons, and not as a series of forever separate and unchange able species. [751] AMAGAT, Emile Hilaire French physicist Born: Saint-Satur, January 2, 1841
Died: Saint-Satur, February 15, 1915
Amagat obtained his doctorate in 1872 and taught first in Switzerland, then in France. He was particularly interested in work ing with substances (particularly gases) under high pressure and observing their properties under those conditions. In the 1880s he managed to attain a pressure equal to 3,000 atmospheres. This was a record for the nineteenth century and pointed the way to the further work of Bridgman [1080] a couple of decades later. [752] GRAEBE, Karl James Peter (greh'buh) German chemist Born: Frankfurt-am-Main, Febru ary 24, 1841 Died: Frankurt-am-Main, Janu ary 19, 1927 Graebe, the son of a soldier, graduated from Heidelberg in 1862. At his father’s wish, he studied engineering but soon followed his heart into chemistry. He studied under Kolbe [610], served as as sistant to Bunsen [565], and then joined Baeyer’s [718] laboratory in 1865. Graebe was working on alizarin in 1868. Baeyer himself suggested a mode of attack and when Graebe proved reluc tant to follow the suggestion, he put it in the form of an order, forcing Graebe into fame. Graebe and a fellow student attempted the experiment and the result clearly demonstrated alizarin to have a molecular structure based on anthracene, a compound made up of three joined rings of carbon atoms. It was now com paratively simple to reverse the process and, starting with anthracene from coal tar, make alizarin out of it. By 1869 a practical method for this was evolved, partly by accident (a mixture was inad vertently left over a flame and forgotten until it charred). Perkin [734] worked out the synthesis of alizarin also and obtained a patent on June 26, 1869, only one day after Graebe and his co-workers obtained theirs. In 1870 Graebe was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Königsberg, and in 1878 he trans ferred to the University of Geneva. Graebe introduced the familiar terms “ortho,” “meta,” and “para” by which organic chemists describe the structure of aromatic compounds. Graebe’s life had its misfortunes. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1875. He lost all he had in the inflation that followed World War I. He died, in the end, penniless and disregarded. [753] DUTTON, Clarence Edward American geologist Born: Wallingford, Connecticut, May 15, 1841 Died: Englewood, New Jersey, January 4, 1912 Dutton graduated from Yale in 1860, when he was only nineteen, and almost at once faced the enormous fact of the Civil War. He joined the Union army in 490 [754] JAMES
BREUER [755] 1862 as a first lieutenant and remained in the service thereafter, though not al ways on active duty. In 1890 he reached the rank of major. After the war he grew interested in ge ology and joined a governmental survey of the nearly empty West, studying vol canic eruptions and earthquakes. He de veloped methods for determining the depth of earthquake origin and the ve locity with which earthquake waves travel through the earth. He maintained that the rocks under the continents were less dense than those under the oceans and that the continents were dry precisely because they were light enough to ride high on the rocks making up the outer layers of the planet. The notion that the major slabs of rock found their natural level (through a very slow process), sinking or rising accord ing to their densities, he gave the name “isostasy.” Late in life, in 1906, he suggested that pockets of radioactivity might slowly overheat local areas of the earth’s crust and give rise to volcanic action. This was the first realization of the role of the very slow but very steady heat produc tion of radioactive elements in connec tion with geologic processes. [754] JAMES, William American psychologist Born: New York, New York, January 11, 1842 Died: Chocorua, New Hampshire, August 26, 1910 William James was the son of Henry James, the Swedenborgian philosopher, and the brother of Henry James, the novelist. His life was plagued by ill health and by an initial uncertainty as to goals. He dabbled in art in his youth, then studied medicine, but broke that off in 1865 to travel to the Amazon valley as assistant to the naturalist Agassiz [551]. He returned to his medical studies and in 1867 went to Europe, where he studied under men such as Bernard [578], Helmholtz [631], and Virchow [632], these studies arousing his interest in physiology. In 1869 he obtained his medical degree from Harvard but his health did not permit him to practice. In 1872 he accepted a faculty post in physiology at Harvard, but in 1876 he took the daring step of switching to psy chology, a science then in its barest in fancy. He viewed it as an experimental science based on physiology and not as a vague form of philosophy. He prepared a monumental two-volume work The
from this was prepared a shorter text book that was standard for many years. He was temperamentally unsuited to lab oratory work himself but students of his, such as Granville Hall [780], carried on. Later in life he turned to the psychol ogy of religion (his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, proved an enduring success) and to philosophy. He also came to be inter ested in psychic research, which had grown fashionable at the turn of the cen tury.
[755] BREUER, Josef (broi'er) Austrian physician Born: Vienna, January 15, 1842 Died: Vienna, June 20, 1925 Breuer, the son of a Jewish teacher of religion, studied at the University of Vienna and obtained his medical degree in 1867 and soon became one of the most highly regarded physicians in Vienna. In physiology, Breuer, together with the physiologist Ewald Hering, demonstrated the reflexes involved in res piration, in 1868. He went on, in the 1870s, to demonstrate the functioning of the semicircular canals of the inner ear as organs of balance. In 1880 Breuer moved into a new area, when he studied a patient whom he reported on as “Anna O.” She suffered from psychological disturbances, includ ing various disabilities (even occasional paralysis) and a dissociated personality. Breuer found that if Anna O. could be induced to relate her fantasies, some times with the help of hypnosis, her symptoms were alleviated. He decided that important causes of such ailments were embedded in the unconscious mind
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