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341 [514] DUMAS
WÜHLER [515] In 1908 a grandson took apart the large telescope, which had grown rickety and dangerous. It had never really done much but give Lord Rosse a reason for living. It was still the largest telescope ever built when it was dismantled, but soon Hale [974] was to have still larger ones built. [514] DUMAS, Jean Baptiste André (dyoo-mah') French chemist Born: Alais (now Alès), Gard, July 14, 1800 Died: Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, April 10, 1884 Dumas, the son of a town clerk, was in his youth apprenticed to an apothe cary in his native town but found the work dull and traveled to relatives in Geneva. There he studied under Can dolle [418] among others. His work at tracted the favorable attention of Hum boldt [397], who brought the young man to Paris where he first worked as assis tant to Thénard [416], He became professor of chemistry at the Athenaeum and was the first French chemist to offer laboratory instruction. He developed a method for determining the molecular weight of a vapor from its density, which would have worked better if he had understood the distinction be tween an atom and a molecule and been able to apply Avogadro’s [412] hypothe sis. However, it was to be another gen eration before chemists became clear on that point. His real leap to fame came in 1830 when he dared criticize the “radical” theory of chemical structure that Berze lius [425] had advanced, with its atoms and groups of atoms of different electri cal nature. Dumas showed that there existed families of organic compounds and that atoms and groups of atoms, supposedly of opposite electrical charge, could substitute one for the other with out seriously altering the properties of the compound. His “type” theory of or ganic structure was more nearly correct in the light of later developments. Unfortunately Dumas’ courage flagged
in the face of Berzelius’ anger and he re treated, leaving his more stubborn stu dent, Laurent [553], to bear the brunt of the Swedish lightning. Later, when the type theory gained strength, Dumas changed step again and, rather in decently, tried to appropriate full credit at Laurent’s expense. In 1833 Dumas devised an analytical method for the determination of nitrogen in organic compounds which helped make organic analysis quantitative. In 1851, he tried to find regularities among the properties of elements, something Mendeléev [705] was to prove successful in doing, twenty years later. During the time of Napoleon III, Dumas more or less abandoned science. From 1848 on, he was high in govern ment circles, serving as minister of agri culture, as senator, as master of the French mint, as the equivalent of the mayor of Paris, and so on. His political career, however, ended with the fall of Napoleon. [515] WÖHLER, Friedrich (voifler) German chemist Born: Eschersheim (near Frank furt-am-Main), July 31, 1800 Died: Göttingen, September 23, 1882
Wohler, the son of a veterinary, stud ied medicine and surgery and took his degree as a physician in 1823, at Heidel berg, specializing in gynecology but was persuaded by his teacher, Gmelin [457], to take up chemistry. He therefore vis ited Sweden to study with Berzelius [425], forming a lifelong friendship with him. After that he returned to teach in a trade school in Berlin. Wohler’s primary interest was inor ganic chemistry, and he worked out methods of isolating metallic aluminum and beryllium in 1827 and 1828. He also discovered calcium carbide, a sub stance that reacts readily with water to yield the inflammable gas acetylene and he almost beat out Sefström [451] in the discovery of vanadium. In those years, however, he performed a much more important deed when quite
[515] WÖHLER
GOODYEAR [516] accidentally he broke down one of the cherished theories of his friend Berzelius. Berzelius divided chemicals into two kinds, organic and inorganic, depending on whether they had their origin in liv ing tissue or not. Organic chemicals, he believed, required a “vital force” for their manufacture, something not found in the laboratory, so that no chemist could synthesize an organic compound out of an inorganic one without the as sistance of living tissue. He felt that different laws might hold for inorganic and organic compounds; that the law of definite proportions did not hold for or ganic compounds, for instance. Gmelin, Wohler’s old teacher, believed this too. Chevreul [448], on the other hand, was one of those who doubted that the dis tinction between organic and inorganic could be so absolute. In 1828 Wohler settled the matter. He was interested in cyanides and related compounds and was heating ammonium cyanate while on the trail of something or other. To his amazement he found that the ammonium cyanate formed crystals resembling those of urea, and these, on test, proved to be urea. Now urea is the chief nitrogenous waste of the mammalian body, is found in urine, and is definitely organic. Wohler had formed an organic compound out of an inor ganic one and this was a blow against the concept of vitalism that Stahl [241] had set in motion a century and a quar ter before (although vitalism was to sur vive to,receive a number of additional blows—and somehow manage to survive those too). Wohler announced his discovery to Berzelius on February 22, 1828, and the great Swede (a hard man to argue out of an opinion) eventually conceded the point. Actually the importance of Wohler’s experiment has been exagger ated, for there are grounds for arguing that ammonium cyanate was an organic compound to begin with, and Berzelius did so. However, the formation of urea did inspire other chemists to tackle the problem of synthesizing organics out of inorganics, and a quarter century later the feats of Berthelot [674] in that con nection removed all doubts. Wohler also showed that when benzoic acid is taken by mouth, hippuric acid (benzoic acid combined with a com pound called glycine) appeared in the urine. This was the beginning of the study of chemical changes within the body (metabolism). Wohler formed a close friendship with Liebig [532], and after the death of Wohler’s young wife of two years he threw himself into collaborative work with Liebig. Together they worked out the chemistry of a series of substances related to benzene and showed that a collection of atoms, forming the benzoyl group, was transferred intact through a great variety of chemical reactions. After the death of Strohmeyer [411] in 1836 Wohler was appointed to fill the former’s professorial position at the Uni versity of Gottingen, being chosen in preference to many other candidates, in cluding Liebig. The friendship did not suffer as a result. Wohler built up an in spiring record of teaching at Gottingen, as Liebig was to do at the University of Giessen. Wohler did not stick with organic chemistry. He always preferred the inor ganic and remained particularly inter ested in cyanides and in aluminum. He also noted the similarity of carbon and silicon and was the first to prepare silane (SiH4), the silicon-analog of methane (CH4). [516] GOODYEAR, Charles American inventor
December 29, 1800 Died: New York, New York, July 1, 1860 Goodyear was the son of an inventor of farm implements. He was one of those men who have indomitable perse verance combined with a talent for fail ure, and there is no surer formula for frustration. As a young man he entered the hardware business with his father and the two went bankrupt in 1830. Thereafter life was a continuous race with creditors and consisted of grinding poverty broken up by frequent visits to debtors’ prisons. 343 [516] GOODYEAR
MILLER [518] In 1834 he grew interested in rubber. At the time, it was recognized that rubber could be a valuable waterproofing material (in fact it had already been used in the manufacture of raincoats). Unfortunately in cold weather rubber got stiff as a plank and in hot weather it became soft and sticky. Goodyear decided to discover a way of correcting these shortcomings. He was no chemist and hadn’t the slightest no tion of what one might do, but in the usual tradition of America’s nineteenth- century tinkerers he determined to try everything until he hit on something. His first experiments were conducted while in a debtors’ prison. Some people had been trying to mix rubber with sulfur and Goodyear tried it too, with only limited success. Then, in 1839, some of the mixture came acciden tally into contact with a hot stove. To Goodyear’s astonishment, those portions that weren’t scorched too badly had be come dry flexible rubber that didn’t lose its flexibility in the cold or its dryness in the warmth. He began to heat the rubber-sulfur mixtures at higher temper atures than anyone else had tried and thus discovered vulcanized rubber (after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire). Good year patented the process in 1844. Unfortunately the process was too simple. As in the case of Whitney’s [386] cotton gin, anyone could do it and every body did. Goodyear had to spend all his time contesting infringements on his pa tent—about sixty in number, all told. It was not until 1852 that he won his case in the courts (no less a person than Daniel Webster, taking part in his last important trial, was his lawyer). Even then Goodyear’s talent for fail ure won out. He traveled to London and Paris to promote vulcanized rubber, and although Napoleon III awarded him the Legion of Honor, that meant nothing in terms of money. Goodyear was forced to spend large sums of money, which he had to borrow, in the hope of vast re turns. (He passed some time in a French debtors’ prison.) Eventually of course wealth might indeed have poured in. However, he died too soon, more in debt than he had ever been in his life, the es timated total being not less than $200,000 and perhaps as high as $600,000. His name lives on in an automobile tire brand name. It was automobile tires that, half a century after Goodyear’s death, came to represent the major use of the improved rubber he had invented. [517] DUJARDIN, Félix (dyoo-zhahr- dan')
French zoologist Born: Tours, Indre-et-Loire, April 5, 1801
Died: Rennes, nie-et-Vilaine, April 8, 1860 Dujardin was the son of a watch maker. His interest in science was aroused when a family friend, who hap pened to be a surgeon, lent him books on anatomy and chemistry. He was largely self-educated, having lost out in an attempt to enter the École Poly technique through failure in mathe matics. He attempted to find himself in chem istry, in mineralogy (and in art, too) but finally made his mark in zoology, partic ularly in the study of protozoa. In his careful studies, Dujardin failed to see any of the organ systems that Ehrenberg [491], with the support of Cuvier [396], had insisted were to be found in protozoa. There were no com plete digestive systems with oral and anal orifices, merely vacuoles that could form and disappear. In this, he was perfectly right, though he did not succeed in per suading Ehrenberg of it. Dujardin studied other invertebrate groups, too, and in particular, his studies of flatworms laid the foundation for later work on parasitology. [518] MILLER, William Hallowes English mineralogist
shire, Wales, April 6, 1801 Died: Cambridge, May 20, 1880 344 [519] LARTET
PLÜCKER [521] Miller, the son of an army officer who served in the American Revolutionary war, graduated from Cambridge in 1826. His chief contribution to science was his book A Treatise on Crystallography, published in 1839. In it he set up a sys tem of reference axes for crystals in which the different systems of crystal forms could be expressed in terms of three whole numbers, for each crystal face. These Millerian indices have been used ever since. In 1843 Miller undertook the respon sibility for preparing new standards for length and weight, the old ones having been destroyed in the fire in 1834 that destroyed the Parliament buildings. [519] LARTET, Édouard Armand Isi dore Hippolyte (lahr-tay') French paleontologist
15, 1801
Died: Seissan, Haute Garonne, January 28, 1871 Lartet, the son of a landowner, studied law at the University of Toulouse, re ceiving his license in 1820, but became fascinated with the fossils that Cuvier [396] was making famous. He made dig gings of his own, finding fossils of primi tive apes and, in particular, exploring caves in southwestern France. All in all, this nbnpracticing lawyer became one of the founders of modem paleontology. Not long before his death he received the academic recognition of being ap pointed professor of paleontology at the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes. His most spectacular discovery (about 1860) was of a mammoth tooth, which he found in a cave. On it had been scratched an excellent drawing of a mammoth by someone who, clearly, had seen it in life. There was no way of get ting round this demonstration that crea tures at least intelligent enough to be art ists had been coexistent with the mam moth. It was the most powerful blow yet against the traditionally interpreted chronology of the Bible. [520] FECHNER, Gustav Theodor (fekh'ner) German physicist
April 19, 1801 Died: Leipzig, Saxony, November 18, 1887 Fechner, the son of a minister, was precocious, learning Latin by the age of five, when his father, who was also his teacher, died. He obtained his medical degree at Leipzig in 1822 and spent the rest of his life there, never actually prac ticing medicine. Originally a physicist, he was among the first to apply Ohm’s [461] law to electric circuits. He passed through a long siege of ill ness and in 1840 suffered partial blindness from too much gazing at the sun through colored glasses in an at tempt to study afterimages. He therefore turned to the less demanding (at least, physically) subjects of philosophy, po etry, literature, and experimental psy chology in later life. He even wrote hu morous poems and satires under the pseudonym of Dr. Mises and achieved some success in this way. He popularized Weber’s [492] law, to which his own name came to be at tached. He attributed more accuracy to it than it possessed and attempted to found upon it a science he called psycho physics. He published a book on the sub ject in 1860. For all his mysticism and overenthusiasm, he gave a healthy boost to experimental psychology. [521] PLEJCKER, Julius (plyooTcer) German mathematician and physi cist
tal), Rhenish Prussia, June 16, 1801
May 22, 1868 Pliicker, the son of a merchant, ob tained his doctorate from the University of Marburg in 1825. The first half of his life was spent on pure mathematics, and he did notable work in analytic geometry. In 1834 he 345 [522] MÜLLER
AIRY [523] was professor of mathematics at Halle and in 1836 at Bonn. Beginning in 1847 he turned his attention to physics and in his studies of spectroscopy all but antici pated the advance made by Kirchhoff [648] in the following decade. When Geissler [583] tubes became available he began to force an electric current through a vacuum and in 1858 wrote a paper describing the fluorescent effects in detail. His key discovery was that when placed in the field of an electromagnet, the fluorescent glow shifted its position. The shift altered its direction diamet rically when the poles of the magnetism were shifted. Whatever the fluorescence was, an electrical charge was involved in its production. This was the first tenta tive move in the direction of subatomic particles. In 1865 Pliicker found his interest in physics waning, and at the urging of friends, he returned to mathematics. [522] MÜLLER, Johannes Peter (myoo'- ler) German physiologist Born: Koblenz, Rhenish Prussia, July 14, 1801 Died: Berlin, April 28, 1858 Miiller, the son of a shoemaker, turned to biology after an initial tempta tion to become a priest. He studied med icine at the University of Bonn and ob tained his degree in 1822. He contrib uted to almost every branch of biology, served on the faculty first of Bonn then, after 1833, at the University of Berlin. He shared with Magendie [438] credit for founding the modern science of physiology. His most dramatic discovery was made in 1826, when he was able to show that sensory nerves could interpret an im pulse in but one way. The optic nerve, however stimulated, records a flash of light, whether light is really involved or not. He was an old-fashioned biologist in some ways, with vitalist leanings, but logic forced him away from vitalism willy-nilly. During the 1830s he published a large textbook on physiology in which the sci ence was interpreted in the new experi mental fashion of himself and Magendie and in opposition to the vague mysticism of men such as Oken [423] and his disci ples. Man was viewed as a machine rather than as some sort of microcosmic mirror of the universe. Miiller was an in spiring teacher and many first-rate nine teenth-century German biologists, such as Schwann [563], Virchow [632], and Helmholtz [631], were among his stu dents. He was extremely neurotic, suffer ing several nervous breakdowns, one of them after he tried to control student un rest during the Revolution of 1848. He may have died a suicide. [523] AIRY, Sir George Biddell English astronomer and mathe matician
July 27, 1801 Died: Greenwich (now part of London), January 2, 1892 Airy, the son of a farmer, was a snob bish, self-seeking youngster, who pre ferred his well-to-do uncle to his father. At the age of 12 he persuaded that uncle to carry him off and bring him up. He entered Cambridge in 1819 and gradu ated in 1823 at the head of his class in mathematics. He went on to teach both mathematics and astronomy at the uni versity.
He advanced himself with ruthless in tensity and although everyone disliked him, he was successful in his aims. In 1835 he was appointed seventh astrono mer royal, a post he was to hold for over forty-five years, retiring in 1881 at the age of eighty. He modernized the Greenwich Obser vatory, equipping it with excellent in struments and bringing it up to the level of the German observatories, which since Herschel’s [321] heyday had, under the leadership of such men as Gauss [415] and Bessel [439], been forging ahead of those in Great Britain. Airy also organized data that had been put aside to gather dust. He was a conceited, envious, small-minded man and ran the observatory like a petty tyrant, but he made it hum. Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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