Biographical encyclopedia
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506 [780] HALL
REMSEN [781] Wroblewski, although a Pole by lan guage and culture, was born and lived in that part of Poland which was then part of the Russian Empire. He entered the University of Kiev in 1862 and within a year was banished to Siberia for taking part in an unsuccessful Polish rebellion against Russian rule. He was pardoned in 1869 and allowed to go to Germany to treat an eye condi tion. He continued his education there obtaining his Ph.D. in 1874 at the Uni versity of Munich, and did some post doctorate work under Sainte-Claire De ville [603] in Paris. He finally received a professorial appointment at the Jagiello- nian University in Cracow in 1882. He is best known for his work on the liquefaction of the difficult-to-liquefy gases. Following the method of Cailletet [698] and improving on it, he produced liquid oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide in greater quantities than the former was able to. He was even able, for the first time, to get a fine mist of liquid hydrogen, the last known gas (at that time) to remain unliquefied. He seemed to have a hint of strange electrical properties at very low tempera tures but was prevented from carrying on his research when he died of bums in a fire that resulted when he accidentally overturned a kerosene lamp in his labo ratory. It was Kamerlingh Ormes [843] who carried on the work of both lique faction and the study of low temperature electrical properties to a climax. [780] HALL, Granville Stanley American psychologist Born: Ashfield, Massachusetts, February 1, 1846 Died: Worcester, Massachusetts, April 24, 1924 Hall, the son of a state legislator, grad uated from Williams College in 1867 and then did graduate work at Harvard under William James [754], obtaining his Ph.D. in 1878. After further studies in Germany, under Helmholtz [631] among others, he was given a special lectureship in 1882 at Johns Hopkins and was made professor of psychology and pedagogics in 1883. At Johns Hopkins he established a lab oratory in experimental psychology in spired by his reading of the work of Wundt [697]. It was the first of its type in the United States. He also pioneered in the study of child psychology. In 1889 he became president of the newly formed Clark University in Worcester and remained in that post until his retire ment in 1919. [781] REMSEN, Ira American chemist Born: New York, New York, February 10, 1846 Died: Carmel, California, March 4, 1927
Remsen obtained his medical degree in 1867 from Columbia University’s Col lege of Physicians and Surgeons, but de cided to make chemistry rather than medical practice his lifework. He went to Germany for postdoctorate work and caught some of the lectures of Liebig [532] then in the twilight of his career, and worked with the German chemist, Rudolf Fittig (1835-1910). He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1870. Back in the United States, he received a professorial appointment at Williams College in 1872, then in 1876 went on to the newly established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. There he introduced German methods of advanced laboratory instruction. In 1901 he became the second president of Johns Hopkins, one of whose buildings is still called Remsen Hall. He is best remembered for the fact that in 1879 he and a student, Constan tine Fahlberg, working under his direc tion, first synthesized orthobenzoyl sulfimide. Fahlberg accidentally discov ered its intensely sweet taste (he put his fingers to his lips without knowing that a few grains had adhered to them) and patented the compound which is today known as saccharin.
[782] BENEDEN
PICKERING [784] [782] BENEDEN, Édouard Joseph Louis-Marie van (beh-nay'den) Belgian cytologist Born: Louvain, March 5, 1846 Died: Liège, April 28, 1910 Beneden, the son of a biologist, be came a professor of zoology at the Uni versity of Liège in 1870. He expanded on Flemming’s [762] work and in 1887 was able to demonstrate two key facts about chromosomes. First, their number was constant in the various cells of the body and this number was characteristic for a particular species. (It is now known, for instance, that each human cell contains forty-six chromosomes.) Furthermore, he discovered that in the formation of the sex cells, ova and sper matozoa, the division of chromosomes during one of the cell divisions was not preceded by a doubling. Each egg and sperm cell has only half the usual count of chromosomes. This fitted in exactly with Mendel’s [638] theories of inheritance. If the chro mosomes occurred in pairs, and if every genetic factor existed in duplicate (one on each of a particular chromosome pair), then each parent would contribute one such factor to a sex cell. When ovum and sperm united in fertilization, the chromosomes would reach their nor mal number and the offspring would have a pair of factors again, one from the mother and one from the father. As soon as De Vries [792] rediscovered Mendel, all this became clear. [783] PICTET, Raoul Pierre (peek- tayO Swiss chemist Born: Geneva, April 4, 1846 Died: Paris, July 27, 1929 Pictet, the son of a military officer, be came professor of physics at the Univer sity of Geneva in 1877, moved to Berlin in 1886, and later on went to Paris. He was originally interested in the very practical problem of the artificial pro duction of ice (which had its value of course as a refrigerant and, therefore, food preserver) and from this his atten tion shifted to the production of ex tremely low temperatures. His method was quite similar to that of Cailletet’s [698], but Pictet made use of more elaborate equipment and was able to produce greater quantities of the liquefied gases. [784] PICKERING, Edward Charles American astronomer
July 19, 1846 Died: Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 3, 1919 Pickering was a descendant of an old New England family. His great-grand father had served in George Washing ton’s cabinet. He graduated summa cum laude in 1865 from Harvard, taught mathematics there for a couple of years, then became professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he established a laboratory which was the first in the United States where students could actually work with physi cal instruments. In 1876 he was ap pointed professor of astronomy at Har vard and became the director of its ob servatory. He made important advances in spec troscopy. In 1882 he had a notion of how to speed the study of spectra. In stead of trying to focus the stars one at a time, through a small prism, he placed a large prism in front of the photographic plate. In this way every star in the field was presented not as a sharp point but as a tiny spectrum. Spectra in wholesale numbers could be studied, and much could be learned by way of statistical as tronomy, after the fashion of Kapteyn [815],
Much of the work was done by dedi cated women such as Annie J. Cannon [932] and Antonia C. Maury. With his younger brother, William Henry Pickering [885], he established an astronomical observatory in Peru, in 1891. 5 0 8
[785] WESTINGHOUSE LE BEL
In 1903 Pickering published a photo graphic map of the entire sky, the first such map ever published. [785] WESTINGHOUSE, George American engineer Born: Central Bridge, New York, October 6, 1846 Died: New York, New York, March 12, 1914 Westinghouse’s father, a manufacturer of agricultural implements, had a ma chine shop, and there Westinghouse had a chance to develop his inventiveness. After an interlude during which he served in the Union army in the Civil War, he made his fortune with the in vention of the air brake in 1868 (which he improved to a pitch of true practi cality in 1872). In this device it was compressed air, rather than muscle power, that applied the brakes. When Westinghouse first took his in vention to Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great railroad magnate, Vanderbilt called the whole notion of stopping a train by air sheer nonsense and would not listen. However, it quickly turned out that Vanderbilt’s objections were the real nonsense and the Westinghouse air brake caught on like wildfire. Westinghouse later took on the alter nating current side of the electrical con troversy, manufacturing equipment de signed by Tesla [867] and fighting Edison [788] hard. In 1893 Westing house won the crucial victory by ob taining for his electrical company the contract to develop the Niagara Falls power on an alternating current basis. He also developed a practical system for transporting gases through pipes under controlled conditions and over long distances. This made gas ovens and gas furnaces practical. His fortune was more or less destroyed in the Panic of 1907, and his life ended with its aura of success tarnished. But money is no real measure, and in 1955 he was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [786] BAUMANN, Eugen (bow'mahn) German chemist
December 12, 1846 Died: Freiburg, November 3, 1896
Baumann, who taught in Strasbourg, Berlin, and Freiburg, made his most im portant discovery in the last year of his life.
In 1896 he found that the thyroid gland was rich in iodine, an element not known before that to occur naturally in animal tissue. The thyroid was unique in being the only tissue to possess iodine. This led to the discovery of the iodine- containing thyroid hormone and to its use in the treatment of thyroid disorders. [787] LE BEL, Joseph Achille French chemist Born: Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Bas-Rhin, January 24, 1847 Died: Paris, August 6, 1930 Le Bel, a nephew of Boussingault [525], was more fortunate than most sci entists, for he was well off financially be cause of family holdings in petroleum workings. When he inherited the fortune, he established his own laboratory. He was educated in Paris where he studied under Balard [529], among others. He met Van’t Hoff [829] briefly on the latter’s visit, as a student, to Paris. In 1874, two months earlier than Van’t Hoff, and quite independently, he announced the theory of the relationship of optical activity to molecular structure. His analysis was not quite as precise as Van’t Hoff’s, however, but it is custom ary to allow him an equal share of the credit. Unlike Van’t Hoff, Le Bel, who never married, retreated into isolation and did not go on to still greater things. In 1891 he tried to show that the spatial distri bution of bonds about the nitrogen atom could also produce optical activity. Al though the thought is correct, Le Bel’s demonstration was faulty. The comple tion of this task had to await Pope [991]. 509 [788] EDISON
EDISON [788] [788] EDISON, Thomas Alva American inventor
1847
Died: West Orange, New Jersey, October 18, 1931 Edison was the son of a Canadian whose grandfather was an American Tory who had fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War. Edison’s father fled back to the United States after the Cana dian rebellion of 1837. Young Thomas himself represents the classic tale, so beloved by Americans, of the self-made man—of the poor boy who, without schooling or influence, made his way to fame and fortune by hard work and intelligence. He was a puzzling boy from the start. His curious way of asking questions was taken for queemess by the neighbors, and his schoolteacher told his mother he was “addled.” Edison’s mother, furious, took him out of school. She was in any case concerned for his delicate health and, being a schoolteacher by profession, could easily supervise his education her self. Edison also turned to books for an education. His unusual mind then began to show itself, for he remembered almost everything he read, and he read almost as quickly as he could turn the pages. He devoured nearly everything, though he found Newton’s Principia too much for him—but then he was only twelve years old at the time. When he began to read books on sci ence, he turned to experimentation in a chemical laboratory he built in the house, as Perkin [734] was doing in Eng land. In order to get money for chemi cals and equipment he began to work. At the age of twelve he got a job as a newsboy on a train between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. (During the stop at Detroit, he spent his time in the li brary.) Selling newspapers wasn’t enough for Edison. He bought secondhand printing equipment and began to publish a weekly newspaper of his own, the first newspaper ever to be printed on a train. With his earnings he set up a chemical laboratory in the baggage car. Unfortu nately, a chemical fire started at one time and he and his equipment were thrown off the train. On another occa sion, according to one story, which may not be true, while trying to board a freight train, he was helped in by the conductor, who used his ears as a han dle. This resulted in his permanent deafness. (It should be pointed out that his son, Charles, who was one day to be governor of New Jersey, also suffered from deafness, so the condition may be organic and not externally imposed.) In 1862 young Edison, in true Horatio Alger fashion, rescued a small boy on the train tracks and the grateful father, who had no money, offered to teach Edison telegraphy. Edison was eager to learn and quickly became the best and fastest telegrapher in the United States. He also earned enough money to buy a collection of the writings of Faraday [474], which solidified his interest in electrical technology. In 1868 Edison went to Boston as a telegrapher and that year patented his first invention. It was a device to record votes mechanically. He thought it would speed matters in Congress and that it would be welcomed. However, a Con gressman told him there was no desire to speed proceedings and that sometimes a slow vote was a political necessity. After that, Edison decided never to invent any thing unless he was sure it was needed. In 1869 he went to New York City to find employment. While he was in a bro ker’s office, waiting to be interviewed, a telegraph machine broke down. Edison was the only one there who could fix it, and he was promptly offered a better job than he had expected to get. In a few months he decided to become a profes sional inventor, beginning with a stock ticker he had devised during his stay in Wall Street. He offered it to the presi dent of a large Wall Street firm, wanting to ask $5000 but lacking the courage to do so. So he asked the president to make an offer and the president offered $40,000. Edison, still only twenty-three, was in business. He founded the first firm of consulting engineers and for the next six years worked in Newark, New Jersey,
1788] EDISON
EDISON [788] turning out such inventions as waxpaper and the mimeograph, to say nothing of important improvements in telegraphy. He worked about twenty hours a day, sleeping in catnaps, and developed a group of capable assistants. Somehow he found time to get married. In 1876 Edison set up a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first indus trial research laboratory. It was to be an “invention factory.” Eventually he had as many as eighty competent scientists working for him. It was the beginning of the modem notion of the “research team.”
He hoped to be able to produce a new invention every ten days. He didn’t fall far short of that, for before he died, he had patented nearly 1,300 inventions, a record no other inventor has ever ap proached. In one four-year stretch, he obtained 300 patents, or one every five days. He was called the Wizard of Menlo Park and in his lifetime it was al ready estimated that his inventions were worth twenty-five billion dollars to hu manity—surely a conservative estimate. Needless to say, he himself profited far less than humanity generally. In Menlo Park in 1877 Edison im proved the telephone, invented earlier by Alexander Graham Bell [789], and made it practical. He also invented what proved to be his own favorite ac complishment—the phonograph. He put tin foil on a cylinder, set a free-floating needle skimming over it as the cylinder turned, and connected a receiver to carry sound waves to the needle. The needle, vibrating in time to the sound waves, impressed a wavering track on the tin. Afterward, following that track, it repro duced the sound waves (distorted but recognizable). The device has been improved in de tail since then (by Edison himself, to begin with). The cylinder has become a flat disc, thanks to Berliner [819], and the sound is magnified electronically and much improved in quality, but the basic principle remains the same. With the invention of a machine that could talk, Edison finally convinced the world he could do anything. In 1878, still only thirty-one, he announced that he would tackle the problem of produc ing light by electricity. Now, inventors had been attempting this for many years, and several like Nemst [936] and Swan [677] had constructed devices for pro ducing electrically generated light. Swan, indeed, had devised an incandescent bulb much like the one that Edison was later to construct, but he could not make the necessary vacuum within it sufficiently good for long life. Each had attained but a qualified success and no one had yet produced anything that could really be used cheaply and in quantity outside the laboratory, with a quality of light that could compete with burning gas. Never theless, when Edison announced that he would try, illuminating gas stocks tum bled at once in value in New York and London, so absolute was the faith in his ability. This time, however, Edison had bitten off almost more than he could chew. What he was looking for was some sort of wire that could be heated to incan descence by an electric current. The wire would have to be kept within an evac uated glass chamber, of course, for in the presence of air it would simply bum up in the oxygen once it was heated hot enough to glow. It was hard to get a wire that would withstand the intense heat over a long period of time even in a vacuum and for a while it looked as though Edison would fail altogether. It took him $50,000 and a year of experi mentation to find that platinum wires would not work. After thousands of experiments, Edison found what he wanted: a wire that would warm to white heat in a vac uum without melting, evaporating, or breaking. No metal was needed after all —only a scorched cotton thread. Inde pendently he had reached the same solu tion that Swan had arrived at in En gland. On October 21, 1879, Edison set up a bulb with such a filament. It burned for forty continuous hours. The electric light was at last a reality and it received pa tent number 222,898. On the next New Year’s Eve, the main street of Menlo Park was illuminated by electricity in a public demonstration before three thou
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