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591 [921] NEF
BRAGG [922] sion of science. This helped encourage Hitler to ignore that facet of scientific advance, so that Germany did not de velop the nuclear bomb despite its initial lead in the field. Lenard lived to see the bomb exploded after Nazi Germany had been smashed and Hitler had committed suicide. He may have regretted his own stupidity in the light of events, or he may have been altogether too stupid to do so. [921] NEF, John Ulric Swiss-American chemist Bom: Herisau, Switzerland, June 14, 1862 Died: Carmel, California, August 13, 1915 Nefs father, foreman of a textile mill, went to America in 1864 to investigate the possibilities of establishing a mill and remained, bringing his family in 1868. Nef was therefore educated in America, graduating from Harvard with honors in 1884. He did his graduate work in Ger many under Baeyer [718], obtaining his doctorate in 1886. In 1892 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the then new University of Chicago, after having taught at Purdue and at Clark University. He helped transfer the German university traditions in organic chemistry to the United States. He spent considerable time work ing on the chemistry of isocyanides and fulminates, substances containing rather unusual combinations of carbon and ni trogen atoms. This led him to a consid eration of a point of disagreement be tween Kekule [680] and Couper [686] on methods of writing the structural for mula of organic compounds. Kekule had held out firmly for a fixity of valence. He felt carbon always had a valence of four. Couper had maintained that it might sometimes have a valence of two. Nef’s studies of his own compounds made it possible for him to demonstrate conclusively that Couper was right. This broadening of the Kekule system by no means damaged it, but, rather, increased its flexibility and usefulness. Like Couper, Nef suffered a nervous breakdown while still comparatively young, though in his case, the illness was not permanently incapacitating. [922] BRAGG, Sir William Henry English physicist Born: Wigton, Cumberland, July 2, 1862
Died: London, March 12, 1942 Bragg, the son of a master mariner turned farmer, was left motherless at seven. He lived with two uncles and worked in a grocery store. He was edu cated at King William’s College on the Isle of Man and there grew interested in mathematics. In 1882 he entered Cam bridge, on a scholarship, finishing third in his class in mathematics and passing on to the study of physics under Lord Rayleigh [760] and J. J. Thomson [869]. In 1885 he was offered a professorship at Adelaide University in Australia and accepted it, remaining down under until 1908.
The turning point in his life came in 1903 when he gave a presidential ad dress before the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. He chose to lecture on the recent discoveries in radioactivity and atomic structure by A. H. Becquerel [834], the Curies [897, 965], and others and, in so doing, suc ceeded in interesting himself so pro foundly in the subject that he decided to enter the field of radioactive research. Bragg began by showing, from theoret ical considerations, that alpha particles produced by radioactive atoms ought to have a definite energy and therefore a definite range; that is, they ought to travel a definite distance through air or other material before being absorbed. In 1904, making use of some radium, Bragg measured the range of alpha particles emitted and found that there were sev eral ranges, sharply delineated. This lent color to Ernest Rutherford’s [996] theories that radioactive elements broke down in stages and that intermediate atoms would produce their own sets of alpha particles. The different ranges ob served by Bragg clearly represented alpha particles produced by different in-
[923] BOVERI
VERNADSKY [924] termediates in the radioactive series. This alone was enough to make Bragg’s name prominent in the field. Returning to England in 1909 Bragg accepted a professorship in physics at the University of Leeds, and in 1915 he transferred to University College in Lon don. While at Leeds he heard of the work of Laue [1068] on the diffraction of X rays by crystals and was immedi ately interested. Bragg’s son, William Lawrence Bragg [1141], was a student at Cambridge at the time, and it was he who took the initiative in this direction. Together, they worked out methods for determining the wavelengths of X rays by crystal diffraction, and together they shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics (the year after it had been awarded to Laue). The Braggs are the only father- son combination ever to have been hon ored in this fashion. Bragg was another of the first-rank sci entists who wrote entertainingly about science for the general reader, as in Con cerning the Nature of Things published in 1925. During World War I, Bragg headed a research group that invented the hydro phone for the detection of submarines. He was knighted in 1920; later, he suc ceeded James Dewar [759] as director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain; and in 1935 he was elected president of the Royal Society. During World War II he was appointed chairman of Great Britain’s scientific food committee, but did not live to see victory. [923] BOVERI, Theodor (boh-va/ree) German cytologist
12, 1862 Died: Wurzburg, Bavaria, Octo ber 15, 1915 Boveri, the son of a physician, studied at the University of Munich and re ceived his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1885. In 1893 he became professor of zoology at the University of Wurzburg and remained there, by and large, the rest of his life. He was rather prone to illness and died comparatively young. His most important work lay with chromosomes, which, as a result of care ful investigations, he showed did not form at the time of cell division and then disappear. From the work of Beneden [782], it seemed that sperm and ovum contributed equal amounts of chromo somes to the developing organism, and if they were the storehouses of genetic characteristics they must represent con tinuing entities, and this Boveri showed to be so. He held, in fact, that the chromosomes were almost sub-cells that maintained an existence independently of the cells, something that seems to be so. He also maintained and produced evi dence for the belief that chromosomes did not carry inherited factors generally but that particular chromosomes carried particular facets of inheritance. He also studied the detail of cell divi sion very carefully and discovered and named the “centrosome,” the small structure that seems to orchestrate the process of cell division. [924] VERNADSKY, Vladimir Ivano vich Russian geochemist Born: St. Petersburg (now Lenin grad), March 12, 1863 Died: Moscow, January 6, 1945 Vernadsky, the son of a professor, studied at the University of St. Peters burg, where he attended the lectures of Mendeleev [705]. In 1897 he gained his Ph.D. and the next year obtained a professorial appointment at Moscow University. Vernadsky was interested in the over all chemical composition of the earth’s crust and is considered the father of modem geochemistry, though that word itself was coined as long before as 1838 by Schonbein [510]. Vernadsky worked in great detail on the structure and chemistry of silicates and aluminosilicates, which make up a major portion of the crust. He studied the manner in which molecules migrated under the influence of geologic processes, and he was the first to recognize that ra dioactivity released enough heat over the 593 [925] HÉROULT
WOLF [927] eons to be a powerful driving force in geochemical change. He also was the first to recognize the great contribution made by life processes to geological de velopment—to the nature of the atmo sphere, for instance. [925] HÉROULT, Paul Louis Toussaint (ay-roo7) French metallurgist Born: Thury-Harcourt, Calvados, April 10, 1863 Died: off the coast of Antibes, May 9, 1914 Hérault, the son of a tanner, read of Sainte-Claire Deville’s [603] work on aluminum while he was still a student. Hérault studied under Le Châtelier [812] who had himself studied under Sainte-Claire Deville. Héroult’s own dis covery of the electrolytic method of pro ducing aluminum in April 1886 resulted in the development of Europe’s alumi num industry, as C. M. Hall’s [933] identical process developed America’s. There is an odd coincidence in the fact that Hall and Hérault (both names begin with an H) were united, after a fashion, throughout life. Hérault was bom eight months before Hall and died almost eight months before him. Both made themselves famous by discovering the identical process in the same year when both were twenty-three. It meant prolonged patent litigation, of course, but a more or less amicable agreement was eventually reached. [926] LOVE, Augustus Edward Hough English geophysicist
setshire, April 17, 1863 Died: Oxford, June 5, 1940 Love, the son of a surgeon, was edu cated at Cambridge and became profes sor of natural philosophy at Oxford in 1899. In mathematics he was interested in elasticity, the way materials deformed and regained their shape as pressure upon them changed. It was easy to pro gress from this to a consideration of how earthquakes set up waves in the body of the earth. The nature and the properties of these waves had been analyzed by Rayleigh [760] in 1885, but Love showed that this earlier theory was insufficient. Love showed an additional type of “Love waves” (as they are now called) could be set up along Earth’s surface. The analysis of the behavior of Love waves made it possible to estimate the thickness of the earth’s crust in different places in the earth and yielded the first evidence that the crust was considerably thicker under the continents than under the ocean. [927] WOLF, Maximilian Franz Joseph Cornelius German astronomer Born: Heidelberg, June 21, 1863 Died: Heidelberg, October 3, 1932
Wolf, the son of a wealthy physician, obtained his Ph.D. in 1888 at Heidel berg. After two years in Stockholm, he returned to Heidelberg and became a member of the faculty in 1890. He had the advantage of a private observatory that his father had financed. He ex tended Schwabe’s [466] data on the sun spot cycle by gathering all the observa tions he could find on the subject from the time of Galileo [166]. The cycle was confirmed but was shown to be rather ir regular. His best-known achievement, however, was that of adapting the technique of photography to the wholesale discovery of asteroids. The first asteroid had been discovered by Piazzi [341] a century be fore, and thereafter they had been picked out one by one by visual observa tion, so that a man who discovered half a dozen asteroids was most unusual. In 1891, however, Wolf demonstrated how one could take a photograph of a large region of the sky with the telescope fol lowing the stars exactly so that their im ages appeared as points. The asteroids, moving independently, would then ap pear as short streaks. 5 9 4
[928] WALDEN
FORD [929] His first discovery was Brucia (as teroid 323), and over the space of a gen eration, Wolf discovered five hundred more asteroids in this way, a third of all those now known to exist. He discovered Achilles (asteroid 588) in 1906. It was the first of the “Trojan asteroids,” a group that travels in Ju piter’s orbit, in step with that mighty planet, in such a way that Jupiter, the sun, and the asteroids form an equilat eral triangle, a formation shown to be gravitationally stable by Lagrange [317] in 1772, but one that had never before been seen. Also, as Barnard [883] was simul taneously doing in America, Wolf stud ied the light and dark nebulae of the Milky Way. He discovered the North American nebula, for instance (so-called because as viewed from the earth it vaguely resembles North America in shape). He was, in addition, the first to detect Halley’s comet on its 1909-1910 return to the vicinity of the earth. [928] WALDEN, Paul (vahl'den) Russian-German chemist Born: Rosenbeck, Wenden, Lat via, July 26, 1863 Died: Gammertingen, near Sieg maringen, Germany, January 24, 1957 Walden, the son of a farmer, was orphaned as a child. He put himself through school by working as a tutor. He studied and taught at the universities of Riga and St. Petersburg in the Rus sian empire, but after the Russian Revo lution he left the country for Germany. He taught at the University of Rostock from 1919 to 1934. His most important discovery came in 1895, while he was still teaching at Riga. He found that he could take malic acid, which rotated polarized light in clock wise fashion, and cause it to undergo a change, which he could then undo so as to obtain his malic acid back again. Now, however, the malic acid rotated polarized light in the counterclockwise fashion. Somewhere in the course of the series of reactions, the compound had been turned inside out, or “in verted.” The process has been known as the Walden inversion ever since. Studies of the Walden inversion have led to important understanding of reac tion mechanisms. In such studies it is not only the end products of a chemical re action that are investigated but also the intermediate stages whereby those prod ucts are obtained. Knowledge of these stages has greatly sharpened the tools of the twentieth-century organic chemist. In later life, he grew interested in the history of chemistry, publishing an im portant book on the subject in 1947. [929] FORD, Henry American industrialist Bom: Greenfield Village, Michi gan, July 30, 1863 Died: Dearborn, Michigan, April 7, 1947
A farmboy in his youth, Ford, the son of Irish immigrants, early showed no in terest in farm work except for what could be performed by machine. He moved to Detroit in 1887, became a ma chinist’s apprentice at sixteen and was for a time chief engineer for an electric light company. He had little education but much drive. He built his first automobile in 1893. It was a two-cylinder job he drove for a thousand miles and then sold for two hundred dollars. He founded a company for the manufacture of cars of his own design in 1899. The production of stan dardized parts had been introduced a century earlier by Whitney [386], and in 1908 Ford conceived the notion of bringing the parts to the men rather than vice versa. His “assembly line” began with parts and ended with automobiles, each man along the line standing still and performing a single task. He placed the automobile within the reach of the average man’s wallet and revolutionized the American way of life; more than that, he gave a new push to the Industrial Revolution. His mass pro duction methods were imitated in other
[930] KIPPING
BAEKELAND [931] industries and in other nations. Even in the Soviet Union, later on, where capital ism was an enemy, the technological methods of capitalism were welcomed, and Ford was almost a hero. He was inconsistent in many ways. Vaguely pacifist, he was a great producer of war goods. Incredibly shrewd in busi ness, he was naïve to the point of stupid ity in intellectual matters. In his social views, he was reactionary, bitterly oppos ing labor unions and rather admiring Hitler, with whose anti-Semitism he was in sympathy. [930] KIPPING, Frederic Stanley English chemist
1863
Died: Criccieth, Caernarvonshire (now Gwynedd), Wales, May 1, 1949 Kipping, the son of a bank official, graduated from the University of Lon don in 1882 and obtained a minor gov ernment post as chemist. Upon a friend’s advice he decided to go to Germany for graduate instruction and worked under Baeyer [718], whom, however, he claimed he practically never saw. He ob tained his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1887. In 1894 he wrote virtually the first textbook restricted to organic chemistry. In 1897 he was elected to the Royal So ciety and made professor of chemistry at University College in Nottingham. In 1899 he began the research for which he is best known and which he was to continue for forty years. This was in connection with the organic deriva tives of silicon. His interest arose out of his search for stereoisomerism, of the type first explained in connection with the carbon atom by Van’t Hoff [829] and Le Bel [787], in atoms other than carbon. (Stereoisomerism was fascinat ing organic chemists of the time and its study by men such as Walden [928] was yielding exciting results.) Kipping and Pope [991] had presented evidence of stereoisomerism for nitrogen and other atoms and now Kipping was on the trail of silicon. Kipping had the advantage of being able to use the new and very versatile type of reaction dis covered by Grignard [993] at just about this time and could therefore synthesize a variety of organic compounds contain ing one or more silicon atoms in their molecule. He published fifty-one papers all told on the subject, the last during the early days of World War II. In World War II and afterward, the “silicones” grew important as greases, hydraulic fluids, synthetic rubbers, water repellents, and so on. These silicones were substances with complicated mole cules containing long chains of silicon atoms alternating with oxygen atoms, with organic groupings attached to each silicon atom. Knowledge concerning them arose out of Kipping’s researches. This is an example of how the organic chemistry of compounds containing ele ments not usually found in naturally oc curring compounds can turn out to be useful to man as well as interesting to chemists. The investigations of Stock [1043] into organic compounds contain ing boron is another example. [931] BAEKELAND, Leo Hendrik (bake'land) Belgian-American chemist Born: Gent, Belgium, November 14, 1863 Died: Beacon, New York, Febru ary 23, 1944 Baekeland, always at the head of his class, graduated from high school at six teen and like Arrhenius [894] was the youngest and brightest. He attended the University of Gent on a scholarship. He graduated in 1882 and by 1884, when he was still only twenty-one, he had his doc tor’s degree maxima cum laude. His first professorial appointment came in 1887 at the University of Bruges. About that time he won a three-year traveling fellowship and in 1889 arrived in the United States where, thanks to his hobby of photography, he was at once offered a good job and remained thereaf ter. By 1891 he had opened an office as 5 9 6
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