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461 [703] NOBEL
NOBEL [703] Bert’s pioneering work on gas pressure and respiration laid the foundation for a whole branch of medicine involving the effect not of thick air, so much, as of thin air. Bert’s studies and Teisserenc de Bort’s [861] stratosphere combined, by the 1940s, to produce the study of avia tion medicine. Bert’s book was translated into English and reprinted in 1943 be cause of its continuing usefulness in this respect.
[703] NOBEL, Alfred Bernhard (noh- bel')
Swedish inventor Born: Stockholm, October 21, 1833
Died: San Remo, Italy, December 10, 1896 Nobel came by his inventiveness natu rally, for his father was a noted (self educated) inventor. It was an invention of his father, a submarine mine, that brought the family to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1842, for the Russian govern ment had bought the mine and hired the elder Nobel to supervise its manufacture. Nobel (who, on iris mother’s side, was a descendant of Rudbeck [218]) therefore grew up in Russia and was educated by private tutors. In 1850 he was sent to the United States, where he spent four years studying under Ericsson [533]. When young Nobel returned to Russia he found his father engaged in a new project, the manufacture of explosives, for Russia was now engaged in the Cri mean War against Great Britain and France. There was particular interest in nitroglycerine, which had been discov ered a decade earlier by Sobrero [574], Nobel’s stay in the United States had given him the vision of a continent about to be tamed and he could see how roads could be blasted out of mountains, ca nals dug, foundations laid, by using the directed violence of a shattering explo sive such as nitroglycerine instead of the weary muscles of countless human beings. (The vision of peaceful uses for explosives is by no means empty ide alism. In the hands of Chardonnet [743] and Hyatt [728], a modified form of Schonbein’s [510] deadly guncotton served to initiate the manufacture of artificial fibers and of plastics.) The end of the Crimean War led to a decline in the family fortunes. Nobel re turned to Sweden in 1859 and began to manufacture nitroglycerine, which proved just as useful as Nobel had ex pected it to be, but there was no way to make people treat it with the proper re spect, and there were numerous acci dents. His own factory blew up in 1864, killing his brother. The Swedish govern ment refused to allow the factory to be rebuilt and Nobel came to be looked upon as a mad scientist viciously manu facturing destruction. Nobel set grimly to work to discover a method of taming nitroglycerine, experi menting on a barge in the middle of a lake to keep danger to a minimum. In 1866 he came across a cask of nitro glycerine that had leaked. The liquid had, however, been absorbed by the packing, which consisted of dia- tomaceous earth, or “kieselguhr” (made up of the siliceous skeletons of myriads of microscopic diatoms). The earth seemed to remain perfectly dry. He experimented with the nitro glycerine/diatomaceous earth combina tion and found that the nitroglycerine could not be set off without a detonating cap. Short of that the mixture could be handled virtually with impunity. Further more, once it was set off, the nitro glycerine retained all its shattering power. Nobel called the combination “dynamite” and sticks of dynamite re placed the dangerous free nitroglycerine as a blasting compound. Nobel also invented blasting gelatin, becoming wealthy in explosives and in the operation of the Baku oil wells in Russia. Dynamite did indeed open the American West, and explosives generally had and still have myriad peacetime uses. However, they remained the back bone of modem war down to the coming of nuclear weapons, and it was as the in ventor of horrible tools of war that the humane and idealistic Nobel was seen in the eyes of the world. He was a bache lor, moody, lonely, and unpopular, and people could not be made to realize that
[704] WEISMANN
WEISMANN [704] the inventor and producer of dynamite actually thought that his explosives would outlaw war by making it too hor rible. At his death Nobel left his entire es tate, a fund of $9,200,000, for the estab lishment of annual prizes (the Nobel Prizes) in five fields: Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology and Medicine. (A sixth award, in economics, was begun in 1969, but it is separately funded.) They have become the supreme honor that can be won for achievements in these respective fields, and although they carry a cash award of about $100,000, the money is not to be com pared with the honor conferred. The awards were established only after some delay. Nobel had drawn up the will him self and there were numerous loopholes that led to a five-year legal fight. Eventu ally Nobel’s desires won out and the prizes came to be awarded just as the Second Scientific Revolution got under way. The first to be honored with a Nobel Prize in physics was Roentgen [774], whose discovery of X rays began that revolution. The Nobel Institute in Sweden is named for him; and because element 102 was first isolated there in 1958, it was named nobélium. [704] WEISMANN, August Friedrich Leopold (vise'mahn) German biologist Born: Frankfurt-am-Main, January 17, 1834 Died: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Baden, November 5, 1914 Weismann, the son of a classics pro fessor, studied medicine and got his de gree at Gottingen in 1856. After serving as a surgeon in the Austrian army, dur ing the Austro-Italian War of 1859, he became interested in zoology (Leuckart [640] was one of his teachers) and was appointed professor of zoology at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau in 1863. Eye trouble, developing in middle life, made the use of the microscope im possible for him. This forced him to re treat into theory, which in the larger view served him well for it was in theory that he made his name. In the 1870s and 1880s he worked out his own notions of evolution. It seemed to him that life itself was continuous and immortal. This was clear in microor ganisms that simply divided and divided and divided, without ever growing old and dying (though myriads were killed and eaten, of course). This seemed, how ever, true of multicellular life as well. Each organism could be traced back to an egg (and sperm) that was a living part of a living organism that could itself be traced back to an egg (and a sperm) and so on for as far back as life existed. At no point, except perhaps at the very beginning, was there a break and the ac tual start of a new life from nonlife. This is the “continuity of the germ plasm.”
This germ plasm, forming the eggs and sperm, can be viewed as the real essence of life. It can then be pictured as period ically growing an organism about itself, almost as a form of self-protection, and also as a device to help produce another egg or sperm out of a piece of the germ plasm carefully preserved within the or ganism. (Samuel Butler, a contemporary English writer, who attacked Darwin’s [554] theories with mystical notions of his own, put this succinctly: “A hen is only an egg’s way of producing another egg-”)
. . ' The organism might itself die, but it is just as evanescent and as inessential to the real life as a flower or a fruit is to a tree. The buffetings of the environment can affect only the nonessential and tem porary organism and can have no effect on the permanent and well-protected germ plasm within. Since only the germ plasm is responsible for inheritance, the notions of Lamarck [336] concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics are false, it seemed to Weismann. This brought him into strenuous conflict with men such as Spencer [624] who de pended on a form of Lamarckism for their own sociological theories. Weis mann tried to prove his own contention by bringing about a persistent environ mental change and showing it was not inherited. He cut the tails off 1,592 mice
[704] WEIS MANN MENDELÉEV
over twenty-two generations and showed that all continued to bear young with full-sized tails. Weismann went on to make some sug gestions that the next few decades were to prove true. He suggested chromo somes contained the hereditary machin ery and that their careful division during cell fission must maintain the machinery intact. This fit well with the observations of Flemming [762], Weismann further suggested that the quantity of germ plasm was halved in forming egg and sperm and that the process of fertil ization restored the original quantity. The new organism had the correct amount of germ plasm, half from the mother and half from the father. The rediscovery of Mendel [638] by De Vries [792] a couple of decades later es tablished Weismann’s concept firmly. Weismann’s theories, in attacking the views of Lamarck, seemed to uphold those of Darwin, and indeed Darwin wrote a preface for one of Weismann’s books. However, the theory of the con tinuity of the germ plasm did not resolve the great flaw of Darwinism, which was that the facts of variation among individ uals and from generation to generation were not adequately explained. In fact, Weismann’s well-protected germ plasm seemed to have no room for variation at all. It went on from generation to gener ation, perfect and unchanging. If ac cepted literally, Weismann’s theory froze evolution on the spot and left it a mys tery how any evolutionary change could ever have come to be. It was only the theory of mutations of De Vries that unfroze evolution once more. And the time came when Muller [1145] was to show that the germ plasm was not as completely isolated as Weis mann had believed. The buffeting of the environment could affect the germ plasm after all, though not predictably, and not by any means as unsubtle as stretching a neck or cutting off a tail. Weismann was a zealous nationalist and when World War I started, three months before his death, he renounced all his British honors and awards. [705] MENDELEEV, Dmitri Ivanovich (men-deh-lay'ef) Russian chemist
7, 1834
Died: St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), February 2, 1907 Mendeleev came of a large family in which there were fourteen to seventeen children, the records not being exactly clear. Dmitri was the youngest, the baby of the lot. He probably had some Asian ancestry, for his mother is supposed to have been part Mongol. Mendeleev’s grandfather had brought the first printing press to Siberia and published the first newspaper. His father was principal of the local high school. Blindness ended his father’s career while Mendeleev was still very young. The dis ability pension his father received wasn’t enough to support the large family, so his mother set up a glass factory and with incredible energy and determination managed to make ends meet. Meanwhile, from a political prisoner who had been sent out to Siberia, the young Mendeleev received his first lessons in science. In 1849, with Mendeleev just finishing high school (where he was but an indifferent student), his father died and his mother’s factory burned down. There was no further reason to stay in Siberia. With almost all her children settled into independent life, Mendeleev’s mother de cided to devote her remaining energies to getting her youngest an education. She set out for Moscow with him and there met failure. She was unable to get him into college. She went on to St. Petersburg where a friend of her dead husband was able to use his influence to get the young Men deleev into college. She died soon after. Mendeleev finished college in 1855 at the top of his class, then went to France and Germany for graduate training. He worked with Bunsen [565] and indepen dently developed the concept of critical temperature for which Andrews [580] usually gets credit. He attended the great Karlsruhe Congress, where he heard Cannizzaro [668] express his views on 464 [705] MENDELEEV MENDELEEV
atomic weight and was profoundly impressed. He also studied under Re- gnault [561]. He returned to St. Petersburg and in 1866 became a professor of chemistry at the university. He was the most capable and interesting lecturer in Russia and one of the best in all Europe. It was through him that it finally became possi ble to attain graduate training in chemis try inside Russia. Between 1868 and 1870 he wrote a chemistry textbook called The Principles of Chemistry that was probably the best chemistry book ever written in Russian and certainly one of the most unusual anywhere. It had numerous footnotes that took up almost as much space as the book itself. With Cannizzaro’s dictum concerning atomic weights firm in his mind, Mende leev, like Newlands [727] and Beguyer de Chancourtois [622] before him, began to arrange the elements in the order of atomic weights. At once he found an in teresting thing in connection with the property of valence, the concept of which had been worked out some fifteen years earlier by Frankland [655]. The second element in Mendeleev’s list was lithium. It had a valence of 1; that is, an atom of lithium would combine with only one other atom. The next element on the list was beryllium; it had a valence of 2; its atoms would combine with as many as two different atoms. Next was boron, with a valence of 3; then carbon with a valence of 4. In fact, the order went 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1. Mendeleev could arrange all the ele ments known in his time (sixty-three of them) in order of atomic weights and get periodic rises and falls of valence. He could also arrange them in rows, one under the other, so that elements with similar valence would all fall into a ver tical column. These elements would also show similarities in many other chemical properties. Because of the periodic rises and falls of valence, and the equally periodic rep etitions of properties in the various rows, such a table was (and still is) called a periodic table. Mendeleev’s table differed from New- lands’s in that Newlands tried to force all the elements into equal segments con taining seven elements each, whereas Mendeleev recognized that the later pe riods were considerably longer than the first two. The first two periods did con tain seven elements each by Mendeleev’s accounting, but the next two contained seventeen each. This fact was also recog nized at the same time by Lothar Meyer [685], but Mendeleev published first. Mendeleev published his first table on March 6, 1869, and for the first time in the history of science a Russian scientist obtained a hearing at once. Ordinarily, as in the case of Lomonosov [282] and Lobachevski [484], Russian thoughts re mained buried in the Russian language for a number of years before scientists at the centers of learning in western Europe learned of them. In Mendeleev’s case, his paper was translated into German at once and thus was made available to all scholars. Nevertheless, Mendeleev did not meet with sudden acclamation. The general skepticism that greeted previous attempts in the 1860s to make order out of the chaos of the elements still prevailed. But Mendeleev pushed on, improving and refining his table, not hesitating to put a couple of elements out of what was sup posedly the true order of their atomic weight, where that was necessary to put them into the proper columns. (Four decades later this was justified by the work of Moseley [1121].) Furthermore, in the January 7, 1871, issue of the Journal of the Russian Chemical Society, he advanced the cru cial notion for which he truly deserves all the credit he gets for the discovery of the periodic table, to the exclusion of his contemporaries and predecessors who also contributed to it. He left gaps in the table in order to make the elements fit into proper columns, and announced that the gaps represented elements not yet discovered. Choosing three gaps in par ticular, he described the properties the missing elements ought to have, judging by the properties of the elements above and below the gap in the table. This prediction also was met with con
[705] MENDELEEV CARO
siderable skepticism. To Western scien tists it may have sounded like typical Russian mysticism. However, in 1875 Lecoq de Boisbaudran [736] discovered an element that matched, to the last property, Mendeleev’s prediction for one of the gaps. In 1879 Nilson [747] and Cleve [746] produced another. This one matched another of Mendeleev’s ele ments. And in 1885 Winkler [739] pro duced still another and this matched the third. Mendeleev and his periodic table were vindicated in the most dramatic manner possible. Order had been brought into the list of elements and this order was to guide chemists a half century later as they worked out the internal structure of the atoms. Mendeleev was suddenly the most fa mous chemist in the world. The Royal Society awarded him the Davy medal in 1882 and other honors were showered upon him. Even the backward Russian government could not help but be proud of its Siberian son. He was sent on a mission to the United States, where he studied the oilfields of Pennsylvania in order to better advise the Russians con cerning the development of the Cauca sian oilfields. In 1905 his textbook, which he kept carefully up-to-date, was translated into English. His eminence al lowed him unusual freedom. In 1876, he divorced his wife and married a young art student. By Russian Othodox doc trine, he had committed bigamy, but he was Mendeleev and the matter was not pursued.
In the tradition of Gay-Lussac [420], Mendeleev went up in a balloon in 1887 to photograph a solar eclipse. Since the balloon would only carry one man, he went alone—and returned safely, though he knew nothing about handling it. A picture taken of him in the gondola shows him standing with regal dignity. His long hair and beard give him the ap pearance of a biblical patriarch. Mendeleev was a decided liberal in his views and never feared speaking against the Russian government’s oppression of students even though he was scolded more than once and missed election to the Imperial Academy of Sciences as a result, losing out to Beilstein [732]. In 1890 he finally resigned his academic post in protest over the oppression of students. His sympathy for the common people led him to travel third-class on trains in order to be with them. (Max well [692] had this same habit.) But he was a patriot who worked diligently for the Russian war effort during the Japa nese war in 1904. The war was disas trous for the corrupt Tsarist govern ment, but Mendeleev died a decade be fore that government finally fell victim to its own blind incapacity to meet the emergency of war. In 1906, just a few months before his death, he almost re ceived the Nobel Prize in chemistry; Moissan [831] was chosen by one vote. In 1955 a newly discovered element (number 101) was named mendelevium, in belated recognition of his importance to the study of the elements. [706] CARO, Heinrich (kah'roh) German chemist Born: Posen (now Poznan, Po land), February 13, 1834 Died: Dresden, October 11, 1910 Caro was the son of a prosperous Jew ish grain dealer who moved with his family to Berlin in 1842. He was trained to be a dyer, but he attended lectures on chemistry at the University of Berlin. He was working as a dyer when, in 1857, he was sent to England to learn about the new synthetic dyes that Perkin [734] had developed. He learned quickly, improved Perkin’s synthesis, learned enough to become a thoroughgoing chemist, and returned to Germany in 1866 to work for Bunsen [565]. In 1868 he became director of a chemical firm in Ludwigshafen, which was the prototype of the industrial re search organizations that were soon to grow up. Caro, more than any other single per son, was responsible for the vast growth of the dye industry in Germany and for Germany’s domination of industrial chemistry for forty years. Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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