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481 [735] SOLVAY
SOLVAY [735] tural theory, particularly in connection with benzene, and chemists had a guide through the jungle. Hundreds of new chemicals not found in nature—then thousands, then tens of thousands—were synthesized and studied. The task of men like Beilstein [732], who tried to organize the knowledge gathered about all known organic com pounds, was endlessly multiplied. Other compounds, which were indeed found in nature, could nevertheless be prepared in the laboratory more cheaply than they could be extracted from their native place of occurrence. In 1868, for instance, Graebe [752] synthesized the natural dye alizarin, and in 1879 Baeyer [718] synthesized indigo. Natural dyes went out of business altogether. In 1874 Perkin, then only thirty-five, was independently wealthy. German competition was proving too much for England’s dye industry, so he sold his factory and returned to his real love, chemical research. He joined in the grand search for general methods of synthesizing various combinations of car bon atoms so as to devise newer and ever newer routes for manufacturing new compounds. One important type of chemical reaction is known as the Perkin reaction. Using it, Perkin synthesized coumarin, a white, crystalline substance with a pleasant vanilla-like odor. This discovery marks the beginning of the synthetic perfume industry. His quiet, retiring nature prevented Perkin from getting the due he deserved. However, he received the Davy medal of the Royal Society in 1889 and in 1906, a year before his death, was finally knighted. In that same year the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of aniline purple was celebrated and repre sentatives from Europe and America came to London to join in the acclaim. It was the grand climax of Perkin’s life. [735] SOLVAY, Emest (sole-vayO Belgian chemist Born: Rebecq-Rognon, April 16, 1838
Died: Brussels, May 26, 1922 Solvay, whose health as a child seemed shaky, had little formal education. How ever, his father was a salt refiner; and surrounded by the atmosphere of indus trial chemistry Solvay read voluminously and experimented to his heart’s content in chemistry and electricity. An uncle directed a gasworks and young Solvay was called in to help. He worked out several methods of purifying gas that were quite successful. In the process he found that the water he used for washing the gas had picked up am monia and carbon dioxide. He wanted to concentrate this ammonia as a possible useful by-product. Gentle heating drove off the ammonia, and this he could then dissolve in a small quantity of fresh water. For some reason he decided to use a salt solution instead of water alone and when he did this, the ammonia and carbon dioxide entering the solution produced a precipitate that turned out to be sodium bicarbonate. Solvay saw the importance of this at once. Sodium bicarbonate was regularly formed from sodium chloride, but the process required considerable heat and therefore considerable expense in the way of fuel. The new Solvay process required much less heat and therefore much less fuel. Solvay took out his first patent in 1861, founded a company for the manufacture of sodium bicarbonate in 1863, and after three years of rocky going, settled down to success. By 1913 he was producing virtually the entire world supply of sodium bicarbonate. The wealth his chemical inventiveness brought him allowed him to spend his last years in endowing schools so that others might receive the education he had missed and in evolving unusual so cial theories. He invented a system of economy, for instance, that involved the abolition of money and its replacement by a complex credit system. A genera tion later, during the Great Depression, the system achieved a certain popularity under the name of technocracy. There was never any danger of its being adopted, however. Solvay remained in Belgium during World War I and organized a committee
[736] LECOQ DE BOISBAUDRAN ZEPPELIN
that obtained and distributed food. De spite his childhood frailty, he lived well into his eighties and survived to see Bel gium liberated from the German in vader.
[736] LECOQ DE BOISBAUDRAN, Paul Émile (luh-koke' duh bwah- boh-dranO French chemist Born: Cognac, Charente, April 18, 1838 Died: Paris, May 28, 1912 Lecoq de Boisbaudran came of a well- to-do family of distillers (Cognac is the home of the beverage of the same name) and received a good education through the help of his well-educated mother and his own reading. He set up his own chemical laboratory while working in the family business, and in 1859 began to experiment in the new and glamorous field of spectroscopy that had just been developed by Kirchhoff [648]. For fifteen years he searched through various minerals for signs of any unknown spectral lines and in 1874 found what he was looking for in a sample of zinc ore from the Pyrénées. He announced his discovery in 1875 and named the new element gallium, from the Latin name for the territory that later became France. (However, Lecoq means “rooster” and the Latin equivalent is gallus, so there is some speculation that Lecoq de Boisbaudran was using his own name, too.) By 1875 he had prepared enough of the new ele ment, an easily liquefied metal, to pre sent some to the Academy of Sciences. Mendeléev [705] read the reports and stated his belief that gallium was one of the elements he had predicted. When the properties of gallium were studied and compared with the undiscovered element Mendeléev had called eka-aluminum, Mendeléev proved to be right. Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered two more ele ments in later years: samarium in 1879 and dysprosium in 1886. [737] ZEPPELIN, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich, Count von (tsep'uh-lin) German inventor
1838
Died: Charlottenburg, Prussia, March 8, 1917 As was to be expected of a member of the Central European nobility, Count von Zeppelin received a military educa tion and became a cavalry officer in 1858. In 1863 he served in the United States as an observer with the Northern Army of the Potomac. In America also he received the inspiration for his life’s work, for in St. Paul, Minnesota, he en gaged in his first balloon ascension. However, his military career came first. He took part in the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, his state of Württemberg (then independent) fighting on Austria’s losing side against Prussia. With Würt temberg then allied with Prussia, he took part on the winning side against France in 1870. Finally in 1891 he re tired with the rank of lieutenant general in the German Army. Thereafter he was free to spend his time and every cent of his money on aeronautical experiments. Since the time of the Montgolfier [325] brothers, numerous balloons had risen in the air, but once there they could only drift as the wind blew. It was the dream of many men to mount an en gine in the gondola of the balloon so as to direct it according to human will and not according to the wind’s whim. Such a powered air vessel would be a “dirigi ble balloon” (that is, a directable one). In pursuit of this dream, Zeppelin ran through his wealth in no time and had to draw upon public support and the pa tronage of Kaiser William II. It was Zeppelin who conceived the no tion of confining the balloon itself within a cigar-shaped structure of aluminum. (This could not have been possible until the light metal aluminum could be sup plied cheaply and in quantity by the method discovered by Hall [933] and Heroult [925] in the 1880s.) On July 2, 1900, one of Zeppelin’s
[738] ABBE
ABBE [738] beautiful cigar-shaped vessels rose into the air. Beneath it was a gondola bearing an internal combustion engine and pro pellers. It took off on a stately flight that, despite damage on landing, was the first effective directed flight by man, antedat ing by three and a half years the first heavier-than-air flight of the Wright brothers [961, 995]. In common speech, the dirigible balloon was frequently called a zeppelin in the count’s honor (with the initial pronounced “z” rather than “ts” by English-speaking individ uals) . However, the dirigible was doomed to be overtaken by the airplane. The dirigi ble was stately, silent, and awesome, but it was too weak to withstand bad weather and in wartime it presented so fat and (if hydrogen-filled) so explosive a target as to be useless. There were zep pelin raids on London during World War I, but some forty of the large cigars were reported destroyed and Zeppelin died knowing that his invention would not win the war for Germany. Nevertheless, between World Wars I and H, dirigibles made a last stand. Ital ian, British, French, and American diri gibles broke up in a series of disasters, but German vessels remained successful for two decades. The most successful was the Graf Zeppelin named for the in ventor (Graf is German for “count”). This had its maiden flight in 1928 and went around the world in 1929. A larger dirigible, the Hindenburg, was launched in 1936, bearing the swastika on its tail fins. It went down in flames over New Jersey in 1937, and since then airships (usually relatively small blimps) have had but limited uses. [738] ABBE, Cleveland (ab'ee) American meteorologist
cember 3, 1838 Died: Chevy Chase, Maryland, October 28, 1916 In 1857 Abbe graduated from the school that is now the College of the City of New York. After teaching for some years at the University of Michi gan he undertook a series of longitude determinations for the United States Government. He spent the years 1864 to 1866 in Russia, studying astronomy under the son of Struve [483], who had succeeded his father as director of the observatory at Pulkovo. After his return to America, Abbe was appointed director of the Cincinnati observatory. It was here he achieved his fame, for, taking advantage of telegraphic reports of storms (as Henry [503] had done at the Smithsonian Institution), he began to put out daily weather bulletins. These dated from September 1, 1869. The ser vice was highly popular and for once the government acted quickly. A national bureau was established under an army general, and Abbe was offered the post of scientific assistant. He accepted in 1871 and began a system of three-a-day weather forecasts. In 1891 the bureau became the United States Weather Bu reau. Abbe remained the meteorologist in charge until 1916. He is commonly known as the father of the Weather Bu reau. He taught meteorology at Johns Hop kins and did much research in the field. As the earth shrank (in human terms) with advances in transportation and communication, the importance of weather forecasting increased. To the use of the telegraph was gradually added the use of radio reports, of sounding bal loons, of radar, and finally of space sat ellites designed to view the earth’s cloud cover from a vantage point outside the atmosphere. Abbe was one of those who proposed the establishment of standard time zones. Prior to the late nineteenth century, ev ery locality kept its own local time, more or less adjusted to the position of the sun as seen from its own spot on the earth’s surface. When travel was slow, this created no particular problems. With the coming of the railroad, how ever, proper scheduling was almost im possible. As a result of a report pub lished by Abbe in 1879, the government accepted for the nation as a whole what the railroads were already using for themselves. In 1883 the United States was divided into four zones of standard
[739] WINKLER
GIBBS [740] time. Within each zone, the time was standardized at some average value. The time zone system now exists throughout the world, and the advent of air travel has made it all the more useful and nec essary. [739] WINKLER, Clemens Alexander (veenk'ler) German chemist Born: Freiberg, Saxony, December 26, 1838 Died: Dresden, Saxony, October 8, 1904 Winkler’s father was a chemist and metallurgist who had studied under Ber zelius [425] so Winkler had the proper background for his own lifework. He studied at the Freiberg School of Mines and early in his career developed new techniques for analyzing gases. Winkler was proud of the neatness and efficiency of his analytic methods and was upset when in 1885 he analyzed a silver ore and found that all the elements he located amounted to only 93 percent of the whole. There was a missing 7 per cent he could not find. He searched for it steadily for four months and in 1886 isolated a new element, which he named germanium. It proved to be the third of Mendeleev’s [705] predicted elements, one that he had called eka-silicon. By an odd chance, all three of the ele ments Mendeleev had successfully pre dicted had received nationalistic names: gallium for France, scandium for Scan dinavia, and germanium for Germany. In each case, the place of discovery and the nationality of the discoverer was honored. [740] GIBBS, Josiah Willard American physicist
February 11, 1839 Died: New Haven, April 28, 1903 Gibbs, the son of a Yale professor, led a quiet, secluded life in the United States, which during the nineteenth cen tury was as far off the beaten track of science as Russia. He obtained his Ph.D. from Yale in 1863, the first ever awarded by that school for a thesis in engineering, and then continued his stud ies abroad in France and Germany. He returned to New Haven in 1869 and be came professor of mathematical physics at Yale in 1871, retaining that position until his death. Gibbs displayed practical inventiveness and obtained patents for a railroad brake in 1866. Theory, however, was his forte and he performed few, if any, experi ments. He was a poor teacher, and his fame rests chiefly on a series of papers, total ing some four hundred pages, which he published over the period 1876 to 1878 in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences. (The editors of the journal were at first seriously in doubt as to whether to publish the papers.) In these papers, he dealt with the principles of thermodynamics, as worked out by men such as Carnot [497], Joule [613], Helmholtz [631], and Kelvin [652]. He applied them in a thor oughly mathematical fashion to chemical reactions, although they had been worked out from a consideration of heat engines. In doing this, he evolved the modern concepts of free energy and chemical potential as the driving force behind chemical reactions. In the papers he also considered equi libria between different phases (liquid, solid, and gas) where one or more com ponents of a system were involved. He found that for a given number of phases and components (that is, a system made up of ice, water, and water vapor, which is one component and three phases; or solid salt at the bottom of a salt solution in water, which is two components in two phases), the number of ways (“de grees of freedom”) in which tempera ture, pressure, or concentration could be varied was fixed by a simple equation. This is called the phase rule, probably the most elegant discovery Gibbs made. Unfortunately, Gibbs worked against disadvantages. The great European scien tists bothered little with American jour nals, particularly those as relatively ob scure as that in which Gibbs had pub 485 [741] CRAFTS
PRZHEVALSKY [742] lished. Secondly, Gibbs’s mathematical treatment placed his work over the heads of most of the chemists who did see it. (Though, to be sure, the mathematical foundation of chemical thermodynamics as Gibbs constructed it was so thorough and solid as to leave little for his succes sors to add.) One person who did grasp the mean ing and importance of Gibbs was Max well [692], Unfortunately Maxwell died soon after the appearance of the papers, and although he did speak of it to Van der Waals [726], who passed it on to Roozeboom [854], he did not get a chance to publicize it as it deserved, or to show how neatly it accounted for em pirical discoveries in physical chemistry such as those by Germain Hess [528] and by Guldberg [721]. It was not until the 1890s, therefore, that Europe really discovered Gibbs. In 1892 Gibbs’s work was translated into German by Ostwald [840] and in 1899 it was translated into French by Le Chatelier [812]. By that time Van’t Hoff [829] had worked out chemical thermo dynamics independently. Nevertheless, Gibbs’s priority was universally recog nized and the American found himself appreciated at last. In 1901 he received the Copley medal of the Royal Society. In 1950 he was elected a member of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [741] CRAFTS, James Mason American chemist Bom: Boston, Massachusetts, March 8, 1839 Died: Ridgefield, Connecticut, June 20, 1917 Crafts, the son of a woolen-goods manufacturer, graduated from Harvard in 1858 and, as was almost essential for American chemists throughout the nine teenth century, went to Germany for postgraduate training. Among other things he spent a year as assistant to Bunsen [565]. In 1861 he met Friedel [693] in Paris. Back in the United States he obtained a professorial position first at Cornell University in 1868, then at Massa chusetts Institute of Technology in 1871. In 1874 he returned to Paris to devote himself to research with Friedel. In 1877 he and Friedel were studying the effect of metallic aluminum on cer tain chlorine-containing organic com pounds and noticed that a reaction set in only after a period of inactivity and that then hydrogen chloride gas was formed. They found that during the period of in activity aluminum chloride was formed and that it was the aluminum chloride that initiated the reaction. It turned out that aluminum chloride was a versatile catalyst for reactions tying together a chain of carbon atoms to a ring of car bon atoms. The Friedel-Crafts reaction, as it is called, became an important weapon in the armory of the chemical synthesizers and it still is. In 1891 Crafts returned to the United States once more and resumed teaching at M.I.T., serving as president of that in stitution from 1898 to 1900. The chronic ill health that had plagued him all his life forced him to retire then. [742] PRZHEVALSKY, Nikolay Mik haylovich (per-zhe-val'sky) Russian explorer
gion, April 12, 1839 Died: Karakol (now Przhevalsk [renamed in his honor], Kirgiz SSR), November 1, 1888 Przhevalsky, an army officer, taught history and geography at the Warsaw Military School from 1864. Two years later he was assigned to eastern Siberia and he began making major explorations of east-central Asia both within and without the borders of Russia. Five separate expeditions carried him through Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet, though he never was allowed entry into the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. He discov ered mountain ranges unknown to Euro pean geographers and located Lob Nor, a lake mentioned by Marco Polo [105] and not heard of since in Europe. It is lo cated in eastern Sinkiang. He described the Gobi Desert and his meteorological observations brought to the world impor tant knowledge concerning the climate Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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