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611 [958] FESSENDEN BROOM
characteristics were unlinked, the relative positions of the genes could be es tablished. By 1911 the first chromosome maps for fruit flies were being drawn up. Morgan published a book, The Theory of the Gene, in 1926, which may be con sidered as establishing, extending, and completing the Mendelian scheme as far as the eye and the microscope could carry it. H. J. Muller [1145], one of Morgan’s pupils, was to apply another tool, that of the X ray, to the study, but the major advance beyond Morgan had to wait for a quarter of a century and the establishment of molecular biology, through the work of men like Crick [1406] and James Watson [1480], Mor gan was president of the National Acad emy of Sciences from 1927 to 1931. For his work Morgan received the 1933 Nobel Prize in medicine and physi ology. He also gained another and most peculiar kind of renown. In the Soviet Union, in the days when the notions of Lysenko [1214] were paramount in So viet biology, Morganism became virtu ally a dirty word. [958] FESSENDEN, Reginald Aubrey Canadian-American physicist Born: Milton, Quebec, October 6, 1866
Died: Hamilton, Bermuda, July 22, 1932 Fessenden, the son of a minister, worked as chief chemist for Edison [788] during the 1880s, then, from 1890 to 1892, for Edison’s great rival Wes tinghouse [785]. Although almost un known in comparison with Edison or many other nineteenth-century inventors, Fessenden is actually second only to Edison in the number and variety of pat ents he obtained, holding five hundred by the time of his death. His most remarkable invention was that of the modulation of radio waves. Radio waves themselves could be sent out in pulses to imitate the dots and dashes of the Morse code. However, it occurred to Fessenden to send out a con tinuous signal with the amplitude of the waves varied (or “modulated”) to make that variation follow the irregularities of sound waves. At the receiving station, these variations could be sorted out and reconverted into sound. On December 24, 1906, the first such message was sent out from the Massa chusetts coast and wireless receivers could actually pick up music. In this way radio as we know it was bom, although many inventions, notably the triode of De Forest [1017], were required before it came fully of age. Like Armstrong [1143] after him, Fes senden was often engaged in litigation over his patents. [959] BROOM, Robert Scottish-South African paleonto logist
ber 30, 1866 Died: Pretoria, South Africa, April 6, 1951 Broom, the son of a textile designer, attended the University of Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Kelvin [652], and from which he obtained his medical degree in 1889. His chief interest was in paleontology, however, and he collected fossils first in Australia and then in South Africa. He made his home in South Africa after 1897.
He was particularly interested in the problem of the mammalian line of de scent, whether from reptiles or from am phibians, and if from reptiles, from which variety. In his researches he did much to straighten out the taxonomic relationships of the extinct reptiles. He is best known for his work on early human evolution, however. He was one of the few paleontologists who ac cepted the discoveries of Dart [1162] as representing an ancient and early form of hominid, and set about searching for additional remnants of the so-called Aus tralopithecus (“southern ape”). In 1936 he found one, an adult skeleton that seemed larger than Dart’s find. Broom accepted evolution but his early religious training forced him to find divine design in it and to find rea 612 [960] WERNER
WRIGHT [961] sons for arguing that, with the develop ment of the human species, evolution had come to an end. Humanity, in other words, represented the sixth and final day of creation, so to speak, and Gene sis, if interpreted with sufficient latitude, was still correct. This view did not win over biologists, however. [960] WERNER, Alfred (vehr'ner) German-Swiss chemist
cember 12, 1866 Died: Zürich, Switzerland, No vember 15, 1919 Werner was the son of an ironworker. At the time of his birth, Alsace was French, but when he was four it became German as a result of the Franco-Prus- sian War. Werner died in the year it be came French again as a result of World War I. Werner, the son of a factory inspector, received a German education, though he (like his fellow-townsman, Weiss [942]) and his family remained strongly pro French in their sympathies. At the age of twenty, after completing a year of ser vice in the German army, Werner moved to Switzerland where he became a Swiss citizen and where he remained the rest of his life. While he was still in Alsace he in stalled a home chemistry laboratory in his parents’ bam and by eighteen had done creditable original work. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Zürich in 1890, then did postdoctoral work with Berthelot [674] in Paris. His doctor’s thesis dealt with the spatial arrangement of atoms about a central nitrogen atom. Like Kipping [930] and Pope [991] he was interested in extending the views of Van’t Hoff [829] and Le Bel [787] to atoms other than carbon. Before he was through, he had surpassed even Pope, producing optically active compounds about such metals as cobalt, chromium, and rhodium. Beginning in 1891 he developed a coordination theory of molecular struc ture, the idea of which, according to himself, came to him during his sleep, waking him at 2 a . m . He rose at once, got to work, and by 5 a . m . the theory was worked out. Essentially, the theory suggested that the structural relationships between atoms did not need to be restricted to or dinary valence bonds, either ionic as in Arrhenius’s [894] concept of simple inor ganic molecules, or covalent, as in the organic molecules so well represented by the Kekule [680] system. Instead, atoms or groups of atoms could be distributed about a central atom in accordance with fixed geometric prin ciples and regardless of valence. The coordination theory immensely broadened understanding of chemical structure and much could be explained by it that would have been quite myste rious otherwise. Coordination bonds are sometimes spoken of as secondary valence. Both ordinary and secondary valence were finally united into a single theory by men like Pauling [1236] a gen eration after Werner. Werner was forced to work and teach under primitive conditions, in poorly lit basement rooms. Nevertheless, he at tracted many students and was a most popular lecturer. As further proof of his worth, he was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his coordination theory. [961] WRIGHT, Wilbur American inventor Born: Millville, Indiana, April 16, 1867
Died: Dayton, Ohio, May 30, 1912
Wilbur’s life was bound up with his brother’s [995]. Together they bicycled, glided, and built the airplane, though it was Wilbur who, of the two, was the driving force. For several years after the first flight, the United States government could not have been less interested, and in 1908 Wilbur took the airplane to France. There his flights aroused tremendous en thusiasm. However, he died of typhoid fever in 1912, having lived to see air planes begin to take hold of the public
[962] FABRY
PERRINE [964] fancy, but having died too soon to see it come to be used as an instrument of death.
He was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1955. [962] FABRY, Charles (fah-bree7) French physicist Born: Marseille, June 11, 1867 Died: Paris, December 11, 1945 Fabry studied at the ficole Poly technique and received his doctorate in 1892. He lectured first at the University of Marseille and, in 1920, became pro fessor of physics at the Sorbonne. He specialized in optics and in the study of spectra. His most dramatic dis covery came in 1913 when he was able to demonstrate the presence of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Although ozone is an excessively small component of the air it is very important. The ozone ab sorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation of the sun, screening earth’s surface from its life-harming effect. It would seem also that this ozone may have played an important role in the de velopment of life. The original atmo sphere of earth did not contain free oxy gen, most geophysicists think, and the oxygen now present was first formed by the photosynthetic activity of green plants. As the oxygen formed, the ozone (an energetic form of oxygen) built up in the upper atmosphere, and screened off the ultraviolet. Till then, the energy of the ultraviolet had possibly formed or ganic molecules in the sea; afterward that process no longer took place and photosynthesis became the only impor tant method for such formation. [963] DOUGLASS, Andrew Ellicott American astronomer Born: Windsor, Vermont, July 5, 1867
Died: Tucson, Arizona, March 20, 1962 Douglass graduated from Trinity Col lege (Hartford, Connecticut) in 1889. After college he worked first at Harvard, then at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, joining in 1906 the faculty of the Uni versity of Arizona. His interest in the sun led him to an interest in climate, and here he was offered a unique opportunity. Ancient wood is well preserved in Arizona’s dry climate and it shows a pattern of tree rings, whose variations in width betoken successions of seasons wetter and drier than average. The pattern was quite dis tinctive, and as he began with living trees, then worked back to recently dead ones, then to older and older ones, he found he could work out a pattern cov ering many centuries. No sizable section of the pattern fitted any other and he found he could date any piece of wood from the region by noting where its small pattern fit into the larger overall pattern. He could then date the archae ological remnants in which the wood had been found. This system of dendrochro nology, developed by 1920, was the first of many delicate methods of dating the near past accurately, culminating in Libby’s [1342] carbon-14 method of a generation later. [964] PERRINE, Charles Dillon (peh- rine') American-Argentinian astronomer Born: Steubenville, Ohio, July 28, 1867
Died: Villa General Mitre, Ar gentina, July 21, 1951 Perrine was a businessman to begin with, but his skill at photography led him into astronomy, and in 1893 he joined the staff of the Lick Observatory. Like a number of astronomers before him, he was a skilled comet-hunter, but the discoveries for which he was best known were two small satellites of Ju piter, the sixth and seventh, in orbits far outside the four large satellites discov ered by Galileo [166] three centuries be fore. These satellites, first detected in 1904 and 1905, were the first of Jupiter’s outer satellites (probably captured as teroids) to be discovered. In 1909 Perrine was appointed direc tor of the Argentine National Observa
[965] CURIE
CURIE [965] tory at Cordoba, and he made his home in Argentina thereafter. In the 1930s he incurred the wrath of Argentinian rightists and by 1936 he was forced into retirement. [965] CURIE, Marie Sklodowska (kyoo- ree')
Polish-French chemist Born: Warsaw, Poland, Novem ber 7, 1867 Died: Haute Savoie, France, July 4, 1934
Marie Sklodowska’s father was a phys ics teacher and her mother was the prin cipal of a girls’ school, so there seemed every reason for life to augur well for an intelligent girl. However, Poland was under Russian domination at the time and after the unsuccessful Polish revolt of 1863, the Russian fist clenched harder. Her mother died of tuberculosis in Marie’s youth and her father lost his position. Marie was unable to obtain any educa tion past the high school level in re pressed Poland. An older brother and sister had left for Paris in search of edu cation and Marie worked to help meet their expenses and to save money for her own trip there, meanwhile teaching her self as best she could out of books. In 1891 her earnings had accumulated to the minimum necessary, and off she went to Paris where she entered the Sorbonne. She lived with the greatest frugality dur ing this period (fainting with hunger in the classroom at one time), but when she graduated, it was at the top of the class. In 1894 she met a French chemist, Pierre Curie [897], who had already made a name for himself by the discov ery of piezoelectricity, that is, the man ner in which an electric potential could be made to appear across certain crystals by the application of pressure. On July 25, 1895, they were married in a civil ceremony, for both were anticlerical in their views. Even such fripperies as wed ding dresses and gold rings were absent. They invested instead in a pair of bicy cles which they used for transportation on their honeymoon trip. The discovery of X rays by Roentgen [774] and of uranium radiations by A. H. Becquerel [834] galvanized Marie Curie into activity. It was she who named the process whereby uranium gave off rays “radioactivity.” She studied the ra diations given off by uranium and her re ports coincided with those of Ernest Rutherford [996] and Becquerel in showing that there were three different kinds of rays, alpha, beta, and gamma. Marie Curie then applied her hus band’s discovery of piezoelectricity to the measurement of radioactivity. The radioactive rays ionized the air and made it capable of conducting electricity. The more intense the radioactivity, the greater the current conducted. This cur rent could be detected by a galvanometer and could be counteracted by the poten tial set up by a crystal under pressure. The amount of pressure required to just balance the current set up by the radio active radiations gave a measure of the intensity of the radioactivity. By studying various uranium compounds in this man ner, she showed that their radioactivity was in proportion to the amount of ura nium they contained, thus narrowing the source of radiation to atoms of that ele ment. In 1898 she showed that the heavy element thorium was also radioactive. She had, meanwhile, made an interest ing discovery in connection with ura nium minerals, which she was investi gating at Becquerel’s suggestion. As measured by her piezoelectric method, some proved to be much more active than could be accounted for by any con ceivable content of uranium. At once she decided the ores must contain elements that were more intensely radioactive than uranium. Since all the other ele ments known to occur in the minerals were also known to be nonradioactive, the excess radioactivity must be due to the presence of elements in quantity too small to be detected, and such elements must therefore be very radioactive in deed. At this point Pierre Curie aban doned his own research and joined his wife as a willing and admiring assistant, remaining so for the final seven years of 615 [965] CURIE
CURIE [965] his life. (In doing this he judged rightly, for though he was an excellent scientist, she was an outstanding one, and un doubtedly the greatest woman scientist who ever lived.) By July of 1898 the two, working to gether, had isolated from uranium ore a small pinch of powder containing a new element hundreds of times as radioactive as uranium. This they called polonium after Madame Curie’s native land. Nev ertheless, polonium did not account for all the intense radioactivity of the ore by any means. Work went on. In December 1898 they detected the still more radioactive substance and named it radium. However, the quantity was so small it could only be detected, as a trace impurity, by the nature of its ra diations and by the spectral charac teristics observed for them by Demar- çay [825]. What the Curies wanted was to produce radium in visible, weighable quantities so that its extraordinary prop erties should not remain in dispute. For the purpose, large masses of ore were needed.
These existed. The mines at St. Joa chimsthal in Bohemia (then part of Aus tria-Hungary, now part of Czechoslova kia) had been mined for centuries for their silver and other elements. Waste ore, rich in uranium, lay around in heaps. The Vienna Academy of Sciences lent its good offices and the mine owners were perfectly willing to let the two mad French scientists carry olf all this worth less material, or as much as they wanted, without charge, provided only that they pay shipping costs. The Curies paid with their life savings and gladly. At the physics school where the Curies worked there was an old wooden shed with a leaky roof, no floor, and very in adequate heat. The two obtained permis sion to work there and for four years (during which Marie Curie lost fifteen pounds) they carefully purified and re purified the tons of ore into smaller and smaller samples of more and more in tensely radioactive material. All this time, they had to take care of their baby, Irène, who was destined to become a famous scientist in her own right as Irène Joliot-Curie [1204]. But Marie’s burning determination kept the husband- and-wife team going in the face of mountainous difficulties. By 1902 they had succeeded in preparing a tenth of a gram of radium after several thousand crystallizations. Eventually, eight tons of pitchblende gave them a full gram of the salt. Despite their poverty and the obvi ous chance of wealth, the Curies were idealistic enough to refuse to patent the process. In 1903 Marie Curie wrote her doc tor’s dissertation, a Homeric document indeed, and for it, she and Pierre shared the Nobel Prize in physics in that year with Becquerel. (The Curies were too ill at the time to make the trip to Stock holm.) Marie commented on the vast energies poured out continuously by a material such as radium, but the source of that energy remained a mystery until Einstein [1064] in 1905 told how mass could be converted into energy. In 1903 they visited London where they were greeted by the admiring Kelvin [652] and where Pierre gave a guest lecture at the Royal Institution, while Marie was the first woman to attend a session of the organization. In 1906 Pierre was killed in a traffic accident (he was run over by a horse- drawn vehicle). Marie took over his pro fessorship at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to teach there (a remark able thing in the notoriously conservative world of French science), taking up Pierre’s lectures at the point where he had left them. Nevertheless, she could not transcend sex prejudice everywhere. When she was nominated for member ship in the august French Academy, she lost by one vote—because she was a woman. Her 1903 Nobel Prize in physics had been for her studies of radioactive radia tions. In 1911, for her discovery of two new elements, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry and, with her husband dead, had to accept it alone. In later years, her daughter Irène and her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie [1227], won Nobel Prizes, as did her neighbor and close friend Perrin [990]; a most un usual cluster indeed. (Her fame did not free her of her humanitarian obligations. 6 1 6
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