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476 [727] NEWLANDS
HYATT [728] the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on gas equations. [727] NEWLANDS, John Alexander Reina English chemist Bom: Southwark (London), No vember 26, 1837 Died: London, July 29, 1898 Newlands, the son of a minister, was educated at home. He entered the Royal College of Chemistry in 1856 and stud ied under Hofmann [604]. He then an swered the call of adventure in 1860 and joined Garibaldi’s small army, which was successfully to invade the Kingdom of Naples and join it to the new Kingdom of Italy. This gesture was quasipatriotic, for Newlands was of Italian descent on his mother’s side. After his return to England he worked as an analytic chemist at a sugar refinery and grew interested in the table of ele ments. On February 7, 1863, he ar ranged the elements in the order of atomic weights (unaware that Beguyer de Chancourtois [622] had done the same thing two years earlier). Newlands found that properties seemed to repeat themselves in each group of seven ele ments. He announced this as the law of octaves, referring to the musical scale. When he announced this discovery at a meeting of chemists, he was laughed at. The importance of atomic weights was still unrecognized by some, despite Cannizzaro’s [668] labors, and he was asked derisively by George Carey Foster, a professor of physics, if he might not get better results if he listed the elements in alphabetical order. Foster was a capable scientist and he pointed out legitimate weaknesses in the law of octaves, but he is known today only for his facetious remark and is derided for it—which shows the risk one takes in science in laughing at something that seems silly. Newlands could not get his paper pub lished and the whole matter was forgot ten until five years later, when Mende leev [705] published his periodic table. As the periodic table came to be rec ognized for the fundamental advance it was, Newlands’s stock began to rise. In 1887 the Royal Society awarded him the Davy medal for the paper that a quarter century earlier he could not get pub lished. Newlands accepted with grace; he had never grown bitter over the treat ment. [728] HYATT, John Wesley American inventor Born: Starkey, New York, No vember 28, 1837 Died: Short Hills, New Jersey, May 10, 1920 In his early life Hyatt worked as a printer and then established a factory in Albany, New York, at which he turned out checkers and dominoes. In the early 1860s he (and many others) were attracted by a prize of $10,000 offered by the New York firm of Phelan and Collender for the best substitute for ivory for billiard balls. Ivory was ideal but getting it always in volved a dispute with an elephant. Hyatt heard of a new English method of mold ing pyroxylin (a partially nitrated cellu lose such as Chardonnet [743] later used in manufacturing rayon) by dissolving it in a mixture of alcohol and ether and adding camphor to make it softer and more malleable. Hyatt improved the techniques and in 1869 patented a method of manufac turing billiard balls out of this material, which he named celluloid. He did not win the prize, however, for some reason. Celluloid enjoyed a minor boom as the material for baby rattles, shirt collars, photographic film, and so on. It was the first synthetic plastic. However, its great flaw was that it was quite inflammable and it was not until the invention of less inflammable plastics, notably Bakelite by Baekeland [931], that this new class of materials came into its own. Hyatt made other inventions in later life and col lected over two hundred patents, but none to match celluloid. It was enough, though, and in 1914 he was awarded the Perkin medal.
[729] MARKOVNIKOV HITZIG
[729] MARKOVNIKOV, Vladimir Vasilevich (mahr-kuv'nih-kuv) Russian chemist Born: Knyaginino, Gorki Re gion, December 25, 1837 Died: Moscow, February 11, 1904
Markovnikov, the son of an army officer, graduated from Kazan University in 1860, having studied under Butlerov [676], whose assistant he then became. In 1865 he went to Germany for two years where he studied under Erlen- meyer [661] and Kolbe [610]. Returning to Russia, he succeeded to Butlerov’s professorship at Kazan and later taught at Odessa and Moscow. He interested himself in the structure of organic molecules after the fashion of Kekulé [680] and broadened the view in one important aspect. There was a pro nounced impression that carbon atoms could form only six-atom rings, and to be sure these were the rings that were stablest and easiest to form. But they were not the only rings as Markovnikov proved when he prepared molecules con taining rings of four carbon atoms in 1879 and of seven carbon atoms in 1889. He also showed how atoms of chlorine or bromine attached themselves to car bon chains containing double bonds. Such additions are still said to follow the Markovnikov rule, though the reason be hind it had to await the development of the resonance theory by Pauling [1236] half a century later. [730] MORLEY, Edward Williams American chemist
ary 29, 1838 Died: West Hartford, Connect icut, February 24, 1923 Morley graduated from Williams Col lege in 1860 and obtained his master’s degree there in 1863. His ambition had been to become a Congregational min ister (as his father had been), and for that purpose he attended Andover Theo logical Seminary. While waiting for a post, he took up chemistry, which until then had been merely a hobby. In 1868 it was not only a ministerial post that turned up but the offer of a professorship at Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio (now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio). Morley accepted it with the provision that he could preach at the university chapel. In the 1870s Morley was in volved in the same endeavor that later was to occupy the attention of T. W. Richards [968]—the relative atomic weights of oxygen and hydrogen. This won him a reputation in the world of chemistry, but it was his collaboration with Michelson [835] in the famous Mi- chelson-Morley experiment that won him immortality—and in physics. Morley retired in 1906 and lived out the remainder of his life in West Hart ford. [731] HITZIG, Julius Eduard (hit'sikh) German physiologist Born: Berlin, February 6, 1838 Died: Luisenheim zu St. Blasien, August 20, 1907 Hitzig was the son of a well-known Jewish architect and was a cousin of Baeyer [718]. He studied law first, then switched to medicine, studying under, among others, Du Bois-Reymond [611] and Virchow [632]. He gained his medi cal degree in 1862. He interested himself in mental illness and insanity, but he could not have been extremely stable himself; he was vain and contentious to a degree, was con stantly embroiled in polemics and seemed unable to get along with any one.
He was, however, a skillful experi mentalist and, together with Gustav Fritsch (1838-1927), was the first to demonstrate clearly the existence of cere bral localization, in 1870. Working with the brains of living dogs he showed that the stimulation of certain definite por tions of the cerebral cortex stimulated 478 [732] BEILSTEIN MACH
the contraction of certain muscles and that the damaging of those portions led to the weakening or paralysis of those same muscles. It was possible to draw a sort of distorted “map” of the body on the brain as Ferrier [761] and others did. Not only did this dramatically demon strate the nature of at least part of the functioning of the brain but it utterly demolished the phrenological theories that had grown out of the work of Gall [371] three quarters of a century before. [732] BEILSTEIN, Friedrich Konrad (bile'shtine) Russian chemist Born: St. Petersburg (now Lenin grad), February 17, 1838 Died: St. Petersburg, October 18, 1906
Beilstein received his higher education in Germany—he was of German descent —and in 1860, after studying under Bunsen [565], Kekule [680] and Liebig [532], served as assistant to Wohler [515]. He received his doctorate in 1858 and then did further work in Paris and in Breslau. He returned to Russia in 1866 chiefly because in Germany the accent was on laboratory research, which was not his forte, although his father’s death at this time was also a factor in the decision. In Russia, he succeeded Mendeleev [705] at the Imperial Technological Insti tute and there he could surround himself with German students and do armchair work. His labors in that respect were co lossal, and made the more possible, per haps, through the fact that he never married. Like Gmelin [457] his great service to chemistry was the organization of knowl edge. He prepared a giant Handbook of Organic Chemistry, in which he at tempted to list all the organic com pounds with all pertinent information about each. The first edition (1880-1882) was in two volumes and had 2,201 pages. From 1886 to 1889 a second edi tion of three volumes appeared. He had only a single assistant in this task and both worked at it incessantly. In 1900 he turned the task over to the German Chemical Society, which still la bors at it. Beilstein used an orderly system of listing the compounds, following Laurent’s [553] notions of organic struc ture, and in this way helped to establish them. Considering that each year sees thousands of new organic compounds synthesized, it is no wonder that Beil
known), though now consisting of twenty-seven volumes plus another twenty-seven supplementary volumes, is far out-of-date and is likely to remain so indefinitely. Beilstein was elected to the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1881, while Mendeléev, the greater man, was rejected. The reason for this apparently was that Russian science in the nine teenth century had (oddly enough) a strongly pro-German and anti-Russian orientation. [733] MACH, Ernst (mahkh) Austrian physicist Born: Chirlitz-Turas, Moravia (now in Czechoslovakia), Febru ary 18, 1838
ruary 19, 1916 Mach was the son of a schoolteacher who moved with his family to Vienna while young Ernst was still a baby. His training was in physics, and he obtained his doctor’s degree in that subject at the University of Vienna in 1860. He taught at Graz and then at Prague before re turning to Vienna in 1895. However, he was strongly influenced by the “psycho physics” of Fechner [520]. In consider ing the physical side of sensation, as was required by psychophysics, he elaborated the notion in 1872 that all knowledge was a matter of sensation. He became a philosopher of science at a time when scientific overconfidence had reached its peak. After Newton [231] it had seemed that all could be ex 4 7 9
[733] MACH
PERKIN [734] plained by scientists on a mechanical basis and that laws of nature could be considered as almost having an existence of their own. Mach insisted that laws of nature were simply man-made generalizations, conve niences invented to cover innumerable observations, but that it was only the in numerable observations themselves that had reality, provided we went so far as to accept the validity of sensation. He vigorously opposed the use of un seen and insensible objects to explain phenomena, holding out against the atomic theory in particular. The flow of heat was an observed fact and the laws of thermodynamics were interpretations of such observed facts. This was fine, in his view, and nothing further was needed. To seize upon tiny billiard balls to explain the observed facts of gas be havior and of heat flow, a la Maxwell [692], was, he believed, to introduce something that could not be perceived and that was therefore mystical. Furthermore, he was against the no tion that space and time were anything more than generalizations built up from observation. The properties of space had no independent existence but were de pendent on the mass content and distri bution within it (this is still called Mach’s principle, a name first applied to it by Einstein [1064]). Moreover, what we call time was merely the comparison of one set of movements with a stan dardized movement (that of the hands of a clock, for instance). Mach’s philosophy was not greeted with any enthusiasm in his time. The atomists were in the saddle, and as the decades passed, their influence grew con tinuously stronger. Thanks to the work of Einstein and Perrin [990] at the turn of the century, atoms seemed more than ever to assume a concrete existence, and even such a staunch Machian as Ostwald [840] had to allow himself to accept atoms as real. Nevertheless, some of Mach’s philoso phy, Mach’s principle in particular, was to influence Einstein. Moreover, if atoms are now accepted as real by all scientists, Mach’s point of view wins out this far: They are not the mere billiard balls that nineteenth-century scientists had pic tured. In fact, mechanical analogies on the atomic level are impossible after all, and scientists have been forced to accept mathematical expressions as symbolizing atoms without making any attempt to il lustrate them with objects from our ordi nary world. Mach is best known now for his ex periments on airflow, published in 1887, in which he was first to take note of the sudden change in the nature of the airflow over a moving object as it reaches the speed of sound. Conse quently, the speed of sound in air, under given conditions of temperature, is called Mach 1. Twice the speed of sound is Mach 2, and so on. In this age of super sonic air travel, Mach numbers (a phrase first used in 1925) fill the public prints but few know where the Mach comes from. Mach retired in 1901, after suffering a stroke, and was succeeded in his chair by Boltzmann [769], He remained an active thinker, and served in the Austrian House of Lords, a position of much prestige and few duties. In his last years Mach did not accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, though this theory incorpo rated much of his own views. He was planning to write a book pointing out its flaws when death overtook him. [734] PERKIN, Sir William Henry English chemist
part of London), July 14, 1907 In his school days, Perkin, the son of a carpenter, was enthusiastic in the cause of chemistry. He was greatly inspired by lectures given by Faraday [474] just as Faraday had once been inspired by the lectures of Davy [421]. At the time, however, the science was at a low ebb in England, for all it had been the home of Boyle [212], Cav endish [307], Priestley [312], and Dal ton [389]. To establish a reasonable col lege course in chemistry, it had been 480 [734] PERKIN
PERKIN [734] necessary to import Hofmann [604] from Germany. This was at the sugges tion of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, who was German. Perkin, over his father’s protests, de cided to take up chemistry. He studied under Hofmann, and Perkin’s keen mind and burning interest commended itself to the latter. Hofmann made the young Englishman his assistant in 1855. Perkin, only seventeen, fleshed out his school work by doing research on his own in a home laboratory. One day Hofmann speculated aloud as to whether it might not be feasible to synthesize quinine (the valuable chemi cal used to combat malaria) in the labo ratory, using cheap coal tar chemicals as a starting material. This, he believed, would demolish Europe’s dependence on far-off tropical lands for the supply. All on fire, Perkin went home to try to achieve the task. He failed. The structure of quinine was not known at the time, and even if it had been it would have been far too complex to produce by means of the few synthetic methods then known. It was nearly a century later when Woodward [1416] turned the trick. Perkin tackled the problem in 1856 during his Easter vacation. One day after he had mixed aniline (one of the coal tar chemicals) and potassium dichromate and was about to pour out the usual seemingly worthless mess in his beaker, his eye caught a purplish glint in the ma terial. He added alcohol and this dis solved something out of the mess and turned a beautiful purple. Perkin wondered at once if the sub stance might be useful as a dye. Through all of history mankind had been inter ested in dyes that could turn the color less textile materials of cotton, linen, wool, and silk into eye-catching and col orful spectacles. Unfortunately, few ma terials in nature will add firmly to tex tiles; most either wash out with water or fade out with sun. The most common and best of those that added firmly were the dark blue indigo and the red alizarin, both from plants. (A purple dye from a Mediterranean shellfish made the ancient city of Tyre rich and famous and was so expensive and desirable that it had been reserved for the use of royalty.) Perkin sent a sample of his purple compound to a dyeing firm in Scotland and the excited answer came back that it would dye silk beautifully and could it be obtained cheaply? Perkin now reached a decision that took courage and faith. He patented his process for making the dye (after con siderable trouble, because there was some question as to whether an eighteen- year-old boy was old enough to take out a patent) and left school over Hof mann’s objections. Perkin’s father, de spite his initial opposition to chemistry, came through admirably and contributed his life savings to Perkin’s capital. So did Perkin’s elder brother. In 1857 the Perkin family started to build a dye factory and found themselves at the bottom indeed. Aniline was una vailable on the open market, so Perkin had to buy benzene and make aniline out of it. For this he needed strong nitric acid, which he had to manufacture for himself. At every step of the game he needed special equipment, which he him self had to design. Nevertheless, within six months, he was producing what he called aniline purple. English dyers proved rather conser vative, despite the Scottish experience, and they hesitated, but the French dyers went for the new material in a big way. They named the color mauve (from the French word for the madder plant, which was the source of the somewhat similarly colored alizarin) and the chem ical mauveine. So popular did the dye become that the period is known as the Mauve Decade. The young chemist was suddenly fa mous and, when only twenty-three, found himself the world authority on dyes. He lectured on them before Lon don’s Chemical Society, and in the audi ence was none other than the inspiration of his youth, Michael Faraday. Perkin’s discovery initiated the great synthetic dye industry and stimulated the development of synthetic organic chem istry. Kekule [680] worked out his struc
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