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346 [523] AIRY
BOUSSINGAULT [525] A strange fatality haunted Airy, caus ing him to be remembered for his fail ures. For instance, he committed himself loudly and firmly against the notion of “lines of force” proposed by Faraday [474], and he was to see Faraday’s intu ition established on a firm mathematical foundation by Maxwell [692], He played the role of the villain of the piece in the failure of J. C. Adams [615] to carry through the discovery of Nep tune. In fact, Airy is far better known as the man who muffed the discovery of that planet, than for any of the actual accomplishments for which he was de servedly knighted in 1872. But the most heartbreaking of his fail ures came in the 1870s and 1880s. With the approach of the nineteenth-century transits of Venus across the face of the sun in 1874 and 1882, Airy was deter mined to organize vast expeditions to ob serve the phenomena with unexampled accuracy. In this way he hoped to obtain a measurement of the scale of the solar system still more accurate than that of the recently dead Encke [475]. No effort was spared. Airy’s obsessive thorough ness was exercised to the full. He per sonally trained the observers and even built a model of the Venus transit so that all the motions might be gone through in advance in a kind of dry run. The expeditions were a failure, for Venus’s atmosphere made the moment of contact with the solar disc uncertain. He might have done better to listen to Galle [573], who in 1872 suggested that asteroids, which showed no visible disc, be used for parallax measurements. It was this suggestion that bore fruit under H. Spencer Jones [1140], another astron omer royal, half a century later. In fairness to Airy it must be stated that in his time no asteroid was known to be close enough to the earth to allow a parallax to be made with the necessary accuracy. Characteristically, he had one success in a matter involving his personal health. In 1827 he was the first to design eye glass lenses to correct for astigmatic vi sion—which he himself had. In 1855 he anticipated Dutton’s [753] theory of isostasy to some extent. [524] BORDEN, Gail American inventor and food tech nologist
vember 9, 18Ô1 Died: Borden, Texas, January 11, 1874
Borden’s family and later he himself moved continuously westward during the first three decades of his life. By 1829 he had settled in Texas (then part of Mex ico). During the War of Texan Indepen dence, he published the one newspaper in the territory. He served as a surveyor, too, producing the first topographical map of the Texas territory and surveying the land upon which the city of Galves ton was to be founded. In 1849, because of the discovery of gold in California, the westward migra tory tide became a flood and Borden grew interested in preparing some form of concentrated food that would be nourishing and easily preserved. He pro duced a dried beef product called pem- mican (after a similar Cree Indian product) that won a gold medal at the London Fair of 1851 and that was use ful not only for pioneers crossing the western lands, but also, later, for Arctic explorers. Borden failed to sell his pem- mican to the army, however, and so it proved a financial failure. In the early 1850s he moved back to New York State and turned his attention to making an easily preserved milk concentrate. In 1853 he produced evaporated milk, used extensively by the armed forces during the Civil War. Later he prepared concen trates of fruit juices and of various bev erages and, what with all this, gained a large fortune. He gave birth to the movement that now supplies all the in- stant-this-and-thats filling our food mar kets today. [525] BOUSSINGAULT, Jean Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné (boo-sang-goh') French agricultural chemist
Boussingault was a mineralogist to begin with, having graduated from the
[525] BOUSSINGAULT ABEL
mining school of St. Etienne, in Paris, in 1832. In the employ of a mining com pany, he traveled to South America. He arrived there in time to be involved with the wars of independence of the Spanish colonies, and actually served under Simon Bolivar. For a while he was in charge of the mines of the newly inde pendent nation of Colombia. Back in France he grew interested in agricultural chemistry and may be con sidered the founder of the experimental aspect of that subject. One of the tasks he set himself in the 1840s was tracing the source of the nitrogen in the com pounds of living organisms. In the case of plants he was able to show that le gumes (peas, beans, etc.) obtained their nitrogen from the air, for when he grew such plants in nitrogen-free soil and wa tered them with nitrogen-free water, they nevertheless gained nitrogen. It could only come from the air. (It was not till half a century later that it was shown that it was not the plant itself that “fixed” the nitrogen, but bacteria grow ing in nodules about the roots.) On the other hand, he was also able to show that animals could not use atmo spheric nitrogen at all. Boussingault was the first to try to feed animals on a scientifically restricted diet, inadequate for the organism’s needs, in order to measure the loss of weight. He showed that the only nitrogen incorporated into the body came from the nitrogen of the food. He was also able to measure the nutritive values of different foods in this manner by checking the quantities neces sary to prevent loss of weight. He es tablished a precedent in this respect that, suitably refined, was to be of inestimable value a half century later in studies of vitamins, trace minerals, and other food factors.
Acting on a statement by Humboldt [397] that South American Indians believed certain salt deposits to be capa ble of curing goiter, a young doctor ob tained samples of those deposits and sent them to Boussingault for analysis. Bous singault found iodine in them and suggested that iodine compounds might be the cure for goiter. The suggestion was ignored for over half a century, but Boussingault was right just the same. His work culminated in the production between 1860 and 1874 of an eight- volume treatise on agricultural chemis try. [526] WHEATSTONE, Sir Charles English physicist Born: Gloucester, February 6, 1802
Died: Paris, France, October 19, 1875
Wheatstone was primarily interested in acoustics in his younger days and in the manufacture of musical instruments (a family involvement). In 1829 he in vented the concertina, a small accor dionlike instrument. He had no formal scientific training but was sufficiently self-educated to gain a professorship in experimental philosophy at King’s Col lege, London, in 1834. He grew interested in electricity and invented a form of the telegraph, in which he somewhat anticipated Morse [473] and which he constructed only after a long visit from Henry [503]. Wheatstone was knighted in 1868 for this and for an improvement (in 1841) of the electric generator that caused it to deliver a less varying current. His name is best known, however, in connection with the Wheatstone bridge, a device that can measure the resistance of a circuit very delicately by balancing a number of currents against each other. Although his use of this device was what brought it into prominence, he was not its inventor and, indeed, openly admitted he was not. [527] ABEL, Niels Henrik (ah-bel') Norwegian mathematician Born: Finn0y Island, near Sta vanger, August 5, 1802 Died: Froland, April 6, 1829 Abel, the son of an alcoholic pastor, lived his life in poverty and suffered pro fessionally from being in Norway, out of the mainstream of scientific advance in France and Germany. He had to support the family when his father died, but he managed to attend the University of 348 [528] HESS
BALARD [529] Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway’s chief city. There a teacher recognized his talent, encouraged him, and helped him financially. During this period he tackled the solu tion to the general equation of the fifth degree. Equations of the third and fourth degree had been solved generally in the time of Cardano [137] but the fifth degree had withstood all attacks in the nearly three centuries since. For a time, Abel thought he had it, but then he found his mistake and went on, in 1824, to prove the impossibility of solving it by algebraic methods. This was a first-rate discovery and Abel was certain it would prove his pass port to the intellectual and academic world. He sent a copy to Gauss [415] who, however, mistakenly thought it to be another crackpot effort at solving the problem and tossed it to one side. Abel finally managed to get to France and Germany in 1825 and did much im portant work. The binomial theorem, which had been developed by Newton [231] and Euler [275], was extended by Abel in a completely general form. He also did brilliant work in certain branches of higher math. Recognition came at last, and in April 1829 news of his forthcoming appoint ment to a professorial position at the University of Berlin came through. Two days earlier, however, poor Abel had died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty- six.
[528] HESS, Germain Henri Swiss-Russian chemist Born: Geneva, August 8, 1802 Died: St. Petersburg (now Lenin grad), Russia, December 13, 1850 Hess, the son of an artist, was taken to St. Petersburg when he was three be cause his father had obtained a position as tutor to a rich Russian family. He studied medicine at the University of Dorpat from 1822 to 1825 and pored over chemistry and geology in his spare time. After a month with Berzelius [425] in 1828, he stayed for a period of time in Irkutsk, Siberia. Then in 1830 he went on to a professorial appointment at the University of St. Petersburg in Rus sia. A half century earlier Lavoisier [334] and Laplace [347] had measured heats of combustion, but the subject had re mained untouched since then. Hess took up the matter once again and in far greater detail. He measured the heats evolved in various reactions and was able to demonstrate that the quantity of heat produced in going from Substance A to Substance B was the same no mat ter by what chemical route the reaction proceeded or in how many stages. This, now called Hess’s law, was an nounced in 1840. By this law Hess made himself the founder of thermochemistry. The evolution of a fixed quantity of heat independently of the nature of the route taken by the reaction was a clear hint that thermodynamics might apply to chemical reactions as well as to heat en gines and paved the way for the climac tic development of chemical thermo dynamics by Gibbs [740] a generation later. Hess also wrote a chemistry textbook that was the standard Russian work in the science till it was superseded by Mendeleev’s [705]. [529] BALARD, Antoine Jérôme (ba- lahri) French chemist Born: Montpellier, Hérault, Sep tember 30, 1802 Died: Paris, March 30, 1876 Balard was bom of poor vine-growers, and it was his godmother who saw to his education as an apothecary. He came to Paris to study at the École de Pharmacie and there he served as assistant to Thénard [416]. He graduated in 1826. He was interested in the chemistry of the sea, particularly, and did considerable searching for new sources of iodine, the element that Courtois [414] had discov ered the previous decade in the ashes of seaweed. In his own researches among the ashes he noted that at times the liquid with which he was extracting his ashes turned brown. In 1826 he tracked this color to a substance that seemed to be intermediate 349 [530] BOLYAI
MULDER [531] in its properties between chlorine and io dine. At first he thought he had a com pound of those two elements, an iodine chloride, so to speak, but further investi gation convinced him it was a new ele ment, which came to be called bromine. (Liebig [532] had come across the same element some years before, had considered it iodine chloride, and had put it away in a bottle with that name on its label. After Balard’s announcement, he rushed back to it and found it to be bromine.) The fact that bromine was an element helped confirm the opinion (just about accepted by then) that chlorine and io dine were elements. The fact that bro mine was intermediate in its properties between chlorine and iodine was also the final proof to Dobereiner [427] that his law of triads was correct. And though Dobereiner’s triads were ignored for a generation, they remained an important step in the direction of the periodic table.
Balard remained interested in sea water and devised methods for extracting various salts, such as sodium sulfate, from it. In 1858 deposits of potassium salts were discovered at Stassfurt, Ger many (the remains of a long-since dried- up arm of the ocean), and the existing oceans were abandoned as a source. In the mid-twentieth century, chemists re turned to the ocean, which is now the prime source of magnesium metal and of Balard’s bromine. No doubt the ocean will serve more and more as a source of mineral wealth. In 1842, when Thénard left his post at the Sorbonne, Balard succeeded him, and in 1851 he was appointed to a professorial position at the Collège de France. [530] BOLYAI, Janos (bohfiyoy) Hungarian mathematician Born: Kolozsvär, Hungary (now Cluj, Romania), December 15, 1802
(now Tärgu-Mures, Romania), January 17, 1860 Janos Bolyai was the son of a mathe matician who as a young man became a good friend of Gauss [415], The elder Bolyai had been interested in trying to prove Euclid’s [40] parallel axiom but of course had failed and had warned his son in dramatic terms against wasting his time on the problem. That merely served to entice his son into working on it when the time came. Bolyai went to engineering school in Vienna at fifteen and at twenty joined the army. In addition to his proficiency in mathematics he had the romantic Hungarian attributes of being a skillful violinist and an excellent duelist. He is once supposed to have measured swords with thirteen men, one after the other, playing the violin between duels and beating them all. By 1823 he had worked out the same ideas that Lobachevski [484] was work ing out in Russia. In 1831, when the elder Bolyai published a book on mathe matics, he included a twenty-six-page ap pendix written by his son that was worth several times the rest of the book put to gether. It explained the non-Euclidean geometry that Lobachevski, unknown to the Bolyais, had already published three years earlier. Gauss praised the paper but could not resist the pettiness of saying he had done the work himself earlier (without publishing—presumably because, though he had the genius to do the work, he lacked the courage to withstand the criti cism so revolutionary a publication might bring down upon himself). The embarrassed Bolyai, equally petty, re fused to do any additional work in the field.
(moiTder) Dutch chemist
1802
Died: Bennekom, April 18, 1880 Mulder obtained his medical degree from the University of Utrecht in 1825. He was particularly interested in the albuminous substances characteristic of 3 5 0
[532] LIEBIG
LIEBIG [532] living tissue, which seemed more compli cated in constitution than the fats and carbohydrates, and which altered proper ties radically on even mild heating. His researches led him to believe that these substances were made up of a basic building block containing atoms of car bon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and that to these were added varying num bers of sulfur and phosphorus atoms. He called the basic building block protein from a Greek word for “first” since that was the foundation of substances that seemed, in turn, to be of first importance in living tissue. Mulder’s theories of the structure of albuminous substances proved to be wrong. Their structure was much more complicated than he supposed. Never theless, the word he used for the building block came to be attached to the al buminous substances themselves. This in vention of a word is Mulder’s only im portant contribution to science—but it is a very important word and suffices. [532] LIEBIG, Justus von (lee'bikh) German chemist Bom: Darmstadt, Hesse, May 12, 1803
Died: Munich, Bavaria, April 18, 1873
Liebig’s father dealt in salts and pig ments and conducted amateur chemical experiments with them. That was Lie big’s introduction to chemistry. In 1818 he was apprenticed to an apothecary, but he did not rest until he could go to a university for formal instruction. He went to Bonn for this purpose but the post-Napoleonic period was a time of re action and repression in Central Europe. Liebig was arrested for political activity on the side of liberalism and had to leave Bonn. He made his way to Paris with the financial help of the Hessian government and there was befriended by Humboldt [397] and Thénard [416], In 1822 his influential friends obtained for him the award, in absentia, of the doc tor’s degree he had earned. Then, through Humboldt’s recommendation, he worked in the laboratory of Gay-Lussac [420].
In 1824 he completed his investigation of a series of compounds called ful minates. At the same time Wohler [515] was studying the cyanates (out of one of which he would be preparing urea in a few years, and revolutionizing chemis try). When both papers were published in a journal of which Gay-Lussac was editor, Gay-Lussac noticed that the for mulas of the two sets of compounds were the same. Berzelius [425], informed of this, was astounded that different compounds should have the same formula. At first, in fact, he flatly refused to believe it. He investigated and found it to be true in other cases. He referred to such com pounds of similar formula as isomers (from Greek words meaning “equal parts”). This was the beginning of the realization that the molecule of a com pound was more than a collection of particular atoms; these atoms had to be arranged in a particular way and different arrangements meant different properties. In this way the notion of a structural formula was bom and came to maturity with Kekulé [680] a generation later. As a result of this interconnection of their work, Liebig and Wohler became fast friends and conducted a series of researches together. Liebig was as opinionated and as quarrelsome as Berzelius and as apt to take up the wrong side in a controversy. Of the great chemists of the time, only Wohler (whose disposition was as sweet as Liebig’s was caustic) escaped his sharp tongue and pen. In fact, Wohler tried, gently, to keep Liebig’s temper within bounds. Liebig entered the new field of organic chemistry (given such a new aspect by his friend Wohler) with great enthusi asm. Organic compounds generally had molecules of far more complicated struc ture than those of inorganic ones, and methods for analyzing the former quan titatively lagged. Gay-Lussac and Thénard had worked out a way of burn ing organic compounds and measuring the quantity of carbon dioxide and water
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