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[1038] SLIPHER DIELS [1039]
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[1038] SLIPHER
DIELS [1039] bond notion with the quantum me chanics that followed the theories of Schrödinger [1117] and De Broglie [1157], (Lewis also worked out a theory of acid-base action founded on the be havior of electron pairs.) In the very early 1930s Lewis was en gaged in the search for hydrogen’s heavy isotope, whose existence was strongly suspected. In this he was anticipated in 1932 by Urey [1164]. Lewis was not far behind, however, and in 1933 was the first to prepare a sample of water in which all the hydrogen atoms consisted of this heavy isotope (“heavy hydrogen” or “deuterium”), which had an atomic weight of 2 rather than the 1 of the usual hydrogen atom. Such water was called heavy water and a decade later it played an impor tant role as a “moderator” of neutrons, slowing them down and making them more effective in setting up a chain reac tion and smoothing the path to the atomic bomb. [1038] SLIPHER, Vesto Melvin (slyffer) American astronomer Born: Mulberry, Indiana, Novem ber 11, 1875 Died: Flagstaff, Arizona, Novem ber 8, 1969 Slipher graduated from Indiana Uni versity in 1901, and he received his Ph.D. there in 1909. He joined the Low ell Observatory at Lowell’s [860] re quest in 1906 and became assistant di rector in 1915 and director in 1926. He held the latter post till his retirement in 1952.
His work extended from the solar sys tem to the bounds of the universe. Within the solar system he was the first to obtain good photographs of Mars, and his photographs of the absorption spec tra of Jupiter and Saturn were used by Wildt [1290] to demonstrate that the at mospheres of these giant planets were rich in ammonia and methane. In 1933 Slipher himself showed that the atmo sphere of Neptune contained methane. He had reached out farther still, for, a few years earlier, he had directed the research that led Tombaugh [1299] to the discovery of Pluto. Beyond the solar system he was partic ularly interested in the nebulae. In 1912 he was the first to apply the Doppler- Fizeau [534, 620] effect to the Androm eda nebula, which at the time was not yet recognized as an extragalactic object. He reported it to be approaching the earth at 125 miles a second. He contin ued the same work on other nebulae and the Andromeda was found to be an ex ception. All but one of the others were receding from the earth, and at rates far higher than the radial velocities of ordi nary stars. Since a motion of recession is indicated spectrally by a shift of absorp tion lines toward the red end of the spec trum, the phrase “the red shift” became famous among astronomers studying the new world of galaxies that Hubble [1136] was uncovering. Hubble used it to establish the concept of the expanding universe. [1039] DIELS, Otto Paul Hermann (deels) German chemist Born: Hamburg, January 23, 1876 Died: Kiel, March 7, 1954 Diels, the son of a professor of classi cal philology at the University of Berlin, was educated at that university and ob tained his Ph.D. there in 1899, having done his work under Emil Fischer [833]. He joined the faculty as a professor of chemistry at once. In 1916 he trans ferred to the University of Kiel, remain ing there till his retirement in 1945, after having seen two of his sons killed on the eastern front in World War II, and his home and laboratories destroyed in bombing raids. For any organic chemist, the synthesis of a new and important compound is a delightful success. In 1906 Diels achieved this when he isolated the un usual substance carbon suboxide (C30 2). Even more important, however, is the discovery of a technique of atomic com
[1040] BARANY
KEESOM [1042] bination that may be put to use in the course of many different kinds of synthe ses.
Diels, together with a young assistant, Kurt Alder [1254], discovered such a technique in 1928. Properly it may be known as the diene synthesis, but it is customary to give a reaction the name of its discoverers and it is commonly called the Diels-Alder reaction. In essence the reaction involves a method of joining two compounds so as to form a ring of atoms. Diels investi gated the potentialities of the reaction, using it to synthesize a variety of com pounds. It was also used by others to synthesize alkaloids, polymers, and other complex molecules. Woodward [1416], for instance, was to use it in his synthesis of cortisone. For the discovery of this technique Diels and Alder shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in chemistry. [1040] BARANY, Robert (bah'rahn-yuh) Austrian physician Born: Vienna, April 22, 1876 Died: Uppsala, Sweden, April 8, 1936
Barany, the son of a bank official, graduated from the University of Vienna in 1900, then went on to study medicine. In 1903 he began work in the University of Vienna ear clinic. There he found ways to apply the knowledge that had been gained of the inner ear as a means of regulating the equilibrium sense. He studied disorders of equilibrium by such means as follow ing eye movements, and by stimulating each inner ear separately by irrigating one ear with hot liquid, the other with cold.
When World War I began in 1914, Barany volunteered for military service in the Austrian army in order to be able to work on any brain wounds that might come his way. He was taken prisoner by the Russians, which was not part of his plan, of course, and in 1915, while he was prisoner of war, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for his work on the ear. After 1916 he taught at the University of Uppsala. [1041] YERKES, Robert Mearns (yur'- keez) American psychologist Born: Breadysville, Pennsylvania, May 26, 1876 Died: New Haven, Connecticut, February 3, 1956 Yerkes, the son of a farmer, was edu cated at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and at Harvard, where he obtained his Ph'.D. in psychology in 1902. He spent his working life studying the intelligence of various animals and soon realized that in studying the mental processes of those animals closest to human beings in the evolutionary scheme—the great apes—he might find information of use in understanding human mental processes. It was not till 1929, however, that he was able to es tablish an experimental station in Florida for the study of primates. In that same year, with his wife he published a book,
standard texts on these animals. During World War I he was in charge of psychological testing of army person nel and administered tests to 1,726,000 men.
He retired in 1944. [1042] KEESOM, Willem Hendrik (kay/- sum) Dutch physicist Born: Texel, North Holland, June 21, 1876 Died: Oegstgeest, March 24, 1956 Keesom, the son of a farmer, was educated at Amsterdam University, and studied under Van der Waals [726] among others. He obtained his doctoral degree in 1904, then served as an assis tant of Kameriingh Onnes [843] at the University of Leiden. He gained a professorial post at the University of
[1043] STOCK
KETTERING [1044] Utrecht in 1918, and in 1923 returned to Leiden. There he became director of the Kamerlingh Onnes laboratory. He continued to work on liquid he lium and was the first person to produce solid helium by applying external pres sure in combination with temperatures of less than 3°K. He also made it clear that there are two forms of liquid helium: helium I and helium II, the latter remaining liq uid at ordinary pressures down to abso lute zero itself and the dividing line com ing at about 2°K. Helium II has very unusual properties. The heat capacity changes abruptly and all internal friction disappears so that it is “superfluid.” Keesom retired in 1945. [1043] STOCK, Alfred (shtuk) German chemist
land), July 16, 1876 Died: Karlsruhe, Baden-Württem berg, August 12, 1946 Stock, the son of a bank executive, studied at the University of Berlin under Emil Fischer [833] and obtained his doc torate in 1899, magna cum laude. He then spent a year in Paris as an assistant to Moissan [831], In 1909 Stock began the study of boron hydrides (compounds of boron and hydrogen). He managed to synthe size a mixture of these compounds to gether with silicon hydrides. Carefully, he separated the boron hydrides and studied each. At the time this was with out practical application, but with the dawning of the space age a half century later, boron hydrides became glamorous indeed as possible rocket fuel additives to increase the push that forced rockets upward into the upper atmosphere and space. In addition the boron hydrides are of theoretical interest since the boron atoms are attached to too many hydro gen atoms if one follows the structures drawn according to the Kekulé [680] system. However, the resonance theory of Pauling [1236] accounts for the struc tures nicely. In the 1920s Stock varied his interests by an investigation into mercury poison ing, from which he suffered most of his adult life. Mercury is volatile enough to release small quantities of its vapor into the air, and these vapors are cumula tively poisonous over considerable pe riods of time. Many chemists, such as Berzelius [425], Faraday [474], Wohler [515], and Liebig [532], may have suffered from mercury poisoning, not al ways knowing it. As a result of Stock’s investigation, modem chemists treat the innocent-seeming little globules of mer cury (always lying around in corners and cracks in laboratory floors) with more animosity than they used to, and take more care to remove them. The last decade of his life was made miserable by difficulties with the Nazi government and by his progressive ill ness. As World War II drew to its end, he fled the advancing Russians to a small town on the Elbe River and there died. [1044] KETTERING, Charles Franklin American inventor
29, 1876 Died: Loudonville, Ohio, Novem ber 25, 1958 Kettering, the son of a farmer, gradu ated from Ohio State University in 1904 with a degree in electrical engineering. In 1909 he founded the Dayton Engi neering Laboratories Company (Delco), which eventually merged with other companies to form General Motors. Kettering’s greatest achievement was the invention of an electric self-starting system, which was introduced for the first time in the 1912 Cadillac. This did away with the necessity of cranking an engine into motion by manual effort (dangerous if the engine caught before you were ready) and brought the auto mobile within the physical capacity of everyone. In collaboration with Midgley [1132], he discovered tetraethyl lead as a cure for engine knock and developed a quick 659 [1045] ADAMS
WINDAUS [1046] drying lacquer that hastened automobile production. In 1919 he became head of the Gen eral Motors Research Corporation. He was involved in the discovery of Freon and in the improvement of the engine developed by Diesel [886] to the point where it became standard on railroads, buses, and trucks. [1045] ADAMS, Walter Sydney American astronomer Born: Kessab, near Antioch, Tur key, of American parents, Decem ber 20, 1876
11, 1956 Adams was the son of an American missionary couple working in the Middle East. He spent his infancy there and was brought to the United States in 1885. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1898. After further education in Ger many he began his role as astronomer in the United States, under Hale [974], ris ing by 1923 to the directorship of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Chiefly interested in stellar spectra, in 1914 he proved that from the spectra alone it was possible to tell whether a star was a giant or a dwarf. In fact, he deduced a star’s luminosity from its spectrum. By comparing this luminosity with its apparent brightness, he calcu lated the star’s distance. This method, miscalled spectroscopic parallax, was us able to distances far greater than those for which the true stellar parallax, first used by Bessel [439], could be applied. Spectroscopic parallax made it possible for Hertzsprung [1018] to deduce the distance of some Cepheid variables so that the period-luminosity curve, so im portant for the knowledge of distances beyond our own galaxy, could be pre pared by Shapley [1102]. In 1915 Adams’ attention was at tracted by the Companion of Sirius. This had been discovered by Bessel, who de duced its large mass (comparable to that of our own sun) from the wobbling mo tions its gravity imposed on the star Sirius. The Companion was actually seen by Alvan Clark [696], and from its dimness he and everyone else assumed it to be a dying, cooling star. Adams, how ever, managed to study its spectrum de spite the glare of nearby Sirius and found it to be a hot star, hotter than our sun. To be so hot it would have to be more luminous (per unit surface area) than the sun. Since it was so dim, that could only mean it had very little surface area. In fact, it could be little more volumi nous than the earth itself. Yet Bessel’s calculations as to its mass still held. For a star to be so small and yet so massive, it must have a density about forty thousand times greater than that of water, or two thousand times greater than that of platinum. Had such a dis covery been made twenty years earlier, it would have seemed utter nonsense. By 1915, however, the new picture of the atom advanced by Ernest Rutherford [996] was just coming into acceptance, and the ordinary atom in the condition in which it existed on the earth was rec ognized to be mostly empty space. In superdense stars such as the Companion of Sirius, the atoms had broken down and the constituent subatomic particles were crushed together in what was called degenerate matter. Such stars came to be referred to as white dwarfs. Other white dwarfs were discovered and in the 1920s Eddington [1085] pointed out that they must have superin tense gravitational fields, large enough to produce a shift in spectral absorption lines toward the red in accordance with the theory of general relativity proposed by Einstein [1064], In 1925 Adams searched for this shift and found one. It was not exactly the size predicted by Einstein but it was close enough to be considered a check of the theory. In 1932 Adams’ spectroscopic work proved of service within the solar sys tem, for he showed that the atmosphere of Venus was rich in carbon dioxide. [1046] WINDAUS, Adolf (vin'dows) German chemist
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) [1047] SUTTON
WIELAND [1048] Windaus obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Freiburg in 1899 and then taught at Gottingen. He intended to be a physician but a year’s work with Emil Fischer [833] converted him to chemis try. In 1907 he synthesized histamine, a compound with important physiological properties. For his researches on choles terol (and therefore steroid) structure (a subject that had been his concern from the days of his doctoral research), he was awarded the 1928 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Thus, for two years in a row, the chemistry prize went to a steroid chemist. It was Windaus who discovered that vitamin D consisted of a steroid mole cule in which a bond was broken by the action of sunlight. This provided the ra tionale for the irradiation process whereby the vitamin D content of such foods as milk and bread are increased by exposure to ultraviolet light. He was also the first, in 1932, to locate a sulfur atom in the molecule of vitamin B, (thiamin), an important step in working out the structure of that im portant compound. [1047] SUTTON, Walter Stanborough American geneticist Bom: Utica, New York, April 5, 1877
Died: Kansas City, Kansas, No vember 10, 1916 Sutton was the son of a farmer who, with his family, moved to Kansas when young Walter was ten years old. Sutton entered the University of Kansas in 1896 and planned to be an engineer but the death of a younger brother as a result of typhoid turned his attention to biology. He did graduate work at Columbia Uni versity but never got his Ph.D. In 1902, however, even without his doctorate he published a paper of tre mendous importance to genetics. He was able to show that all the chromosomes existed in pairs and pointed out that it was very likely that they were the hered itary factors that Mendel [638] had pos tulated in his work, which had been re discovered just two years before. In 1903, in another paper, he maintained that chromosomes carried the genes, that each sex cell contained one chromosome of each pair, the one included being de cided by random factors. After two years of work in the oil in dustry, Sutton returned to the academic life, obtained his M.D. at Columbia in 1907, and then practiced as a surgeon till his death, before his fortieth birth day, of a ruptured appendix. [1048] WIELAND, Heinrich Otto (vee'- lahnt) German chemist Born: Pforzheim, Baden, June 4, 1877
Died: Munich, Bavaria, August 5, 1957
Wieland, the son of a chemist, ob tained his doctor’s degree at the Univer sity of Munich in 1901 and spent most of his later life teaching at that univer sity. His research led him into various re gions of organic chemistry, but his most important studies, begun in 1912, in volved the bile acids. These had been studied by Pregl [982], but where Pregl had branched off into analysis, Wieland kept firmly to the mark. Three bile acids had just been isolated and Wieland began by showing how closely related they were in basic struc ture and the detailed manner in which they differed. The molecular skeleton he showed to be steroid in nature, related to the well-known molecule cholesterol, which was being studied by Wieland’s friend Windaus [1046]. After World War I, Wieland grew in terested in the oxidations that proceeded within living tissue. He maintained, as a result of his experiments over a number of years, that the crucial reaction in liv ing tissue was dehydrogenation. This was the term used for the removal of hydro gen atoms from foodstuffs, two at a time. It was this, he maintained, and not the addition of oxygen, that was enzy matically catalyzed. He was opposed by Warburg [1089], who, as a result of his
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