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T e l l e r [795] DORN
FREGE [797] [795] DORN, Friedrich Ernst German physicist
Miasto, Poland), East Prussia, July 27, 1848
Dorn was educated at the University of Königsberg and taught physics at the universities of Darmstadt and Halle. He turned to the study of radioactivity in the wake of Madame Curie’s [965] dis coveries and in 1900 showed that radium not only produced radioactive radiations, but also gave off a gas that was itself ra dioactive. This gas eventually received the name radon and turned out to be the final member of Ramsay’s [832] family of inert gases. It was the first clear-cut dem onstration that in the process of giving off radioactive radiation, one element was transmuted (shades of the alche mists!) to another. This concept was carried further by Boltwood [987] and Soddy [1052]. [796] MEYER, Viktor German organic chemist Born: Berlin, September 8, 1848 Died: Heidelberg, August 8, 1897 Meyer, who came of a wealthy Jewish family in the textile trade, had an early ambition to be an actor. His family per suaded him to go to Heidelberg where his older brother was a student. The chemistry lectures there converted him to a chemist. He studied under Bunsen [565], Kirchhoff [648], and Kopp [601], and obtained his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1867 under Baeyer [718] at the Univer sity of Berlin. He was not yet nineteen at that time. Meyer received his first professorial appointment at the University of Stutt gart in 1871 but by 1889 had returned to Heidelberg, to succeed his old teacher, Bunsen, as professor of chemistry and held that post till his death. Meyer found, in 1871, that the mole cules of bromine and iodine, made up of two atoms each, broke up into single atoms on heating. He synthesized a number of new classes of organic compounds and in 1882 discovered a compound called thio phene under dramatic circumstances. He was accustomed to demonstrate to his class a color test for benzene. One time, instead of using benzene obtained from petroleum, he used a sample that had been synthesized from benzoic acid. The test did not work. He turned the battery of his high-powered research ability upon the recalcitrant material and dis covered the test was not for benzene after all, but for the very similar thio phene. When benzene was isolated from petroleum, thiophene always accompa nied it; when it was formed from ben zoic acid, however, no thiophene accom panied it. Experiments that fail are sometimes useful. Meyer also pointed out the manner in which a large atom-grouping on a mole cule might interfere with reactions at some nearby point in that molecule. This is called steric hindrance and Meyer in troduced the term “stereochemistry” for the study of molecular shapes. While still in the prime of life, Meyer, in a fit of depression over ill health and the continuing pain of neuralgia, drank prussic acid and killed himself in a chemist’s suicide. He was buried in the Heidelberg cemetery where, nearby, lay his old teachers, Bunsen and Kopp. [797] FREGE, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob (fray'guh) German mathematician
vember 8, 1848 Died: Bad Kleinen, Mecklenburg, July 26, 1925 Frege, the son of a school principal, obtained his Ph.D. from Gottingen in 1873. He joined the faculty of the Uni versity of Jena, gained a professorship in 1879, and remained there all his working life.
He was interested in symbolic logic and improved on Boole [595] by refusing to restrict himself to those symbols al
[797] FREGE
ROWLAND [798] ready used in mathematics. He evolved a set that would be suitable for logic even where the analogy to ordinary mathe matics was not close. Thus, there could be a symbol for “or,” one for “if—then —,” and so on. Although this is now standard in the field, Frege is better known for a colos sal and unique intellectual catastrophe. In the 1880s he began the preparation of a gigantic work applying symbolic logic to arithmetic and attempting to build up the entire structure of mathematics, in cluding the very concept of number, on a rigorous and contradiction-free basis. The first volume of his tremendous work appeared in 1893 and the second in 1903. While the second volume was yet in galleys, the young Bertrand Russell [1005] addressed a query to Frege. How would Frege’s system, asked Russell, deal with the particular paradox that we can here explain as follows: “ ‘Classes’ are groups of similar objects. Some classes are themselves members of the class they describe. For instance, ‘the class of all phrases’ is itself a phrase. On the other hand there are classes that are not themselves members of the class they describe. Thus, ‘the class of all cats’ is not itself a cat. So one might speak of ‘the class of all classes that are members of themselves’ and ‘the class of all classes that are not members of themselves.’ ” Well, then, asked Russell of Frege, is the “class of all classes that are not members of itself’ a member of itself or not? If it is a member of itself then it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves. On the other hand, if it is not a member of itself then it must be a member of the other class of all classes that are members of them selves. But if it is a member of itself— You can go on forever, you see, and get nowhere. On consideration Frege real ized his system was helpless to resolve it and was forced to add a final paragraph to the second volume of his lifework, ad mitting that the very foundation of his reasoning was shattered and the books therefore worthless. He published no more after that. Frege was an extreme nationalist, who hated Frenchmen, Catholics, and Jews and was embittered by Germany’s loss of World War I. One can suspect that he might have been a Nazi sympathizer had he lived long enough. [798] ROWLAND, Henry Augustus (roh'land) American physicist Born: Honesdale, Pennsylvania, November 27, 1848 Died: Baltimore, Maryland, April 16, 1901 Rowland, the son of a minister, was educated at first for the ministry but be came an engineer. He graduated from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1870 and obtained a professorial posi tion there in 1874. After graduate stud ies in Germany under Helmholtz [631], he returned to America to become the first professor of physics at Johns Hop kins University in 1876, a post he held till his death. He was one of the few important nine teenth-century American physicists, and his careful work in electromagnetism, though unappreciated at home, was greeted with enthusiasm by Maxwell [692] in England. Maxwell had won dered if a piece of electrically charged matter, moving rapidly, might not be have like an electric current and, for in stance, set up a magnetic field. Helm holtz suggested an experiment which in 1876 Rowland carried out. He attached pieces of tin foil to a glass disc, placed an electric charge upon the tin, and had the disc rotated rapidly. The system deflected a magnet in the proper fashion and Maxwell’s question was answered in the affirmative. Two decades later, the experiment gained added significance with final confirmation that (as had long been sus pected) an electric current was, after all, accompanied by electrically charged matter in motion. Rowland’s chief fame, however, came out of a bit of applied science. The prisms used to create spectra from the days of Newton [231] onward were giv ing way to the ruled gratings of the type Fraunhofer [450] had begun to use. As
[799] BURBANK
BURBANK [799] spectroscopy grew more and more im portant in chemistry and astronomy, at tempts were made to prepare more and more accurate gratings, with the scratched lines more closely and evenly spaced. Toward the end of the 1870s, Row land devised a method for preparing gratings on concave metal or glass far finer than any formed previously. He scored almost 15,000 lines per inch. A new precision was thus brought to the studies of stellar spectra, and since the telescope was now becoming little more than a handmaiden of the spectroscope, this was a matter of considerable impor tance. Between 1886 and 1895 Rowland himself prepared a map of the solar spectrum in which the precise wave length of some 14,000 lines was given. One story about Rowland is that when testifying at a trial, he answered a ques tion as to the name of the greatest living American physicist by calmly giving his own. When asked how he, usually so modest, could bring himself to make such a seemingly egotistic remark, he replied, “What could I do? I was under oath.”
He died, comparatively young, of dia betes, for it was before the day of Banting [1152]. [799] BURBANK, Luther American naturalist
March 7, 1849 Died: Santa Rosa, California, April 11, 1926 If anyone ever had a green thumb, it was Burbank. He was the thirteenth of fifteen children and he had only the equivalent of a high school education, but for his unique talent even so much was superfluous. As a youngster he was interested in gardening and in growing plants. He had a knack for noting small differences be tween plants and for developing and ex tending these by a variety of techniques including hybridization and grafting. He read Darwin’s [554] book and was aware of the importance of variation. The work of Mendel [638], however, was unknown to him during most of his life, and he never accepted the doctrine that variations were gene-determined at the moment of the fertilization of the egg or seed. He held out in favor of in heritance of acquired characteristics, something after the fashion of Lamarck [336], and lectured to that effect at Stan ford University in his later years. In this erroneous viewpoint, he was encouraged by the fact that he worked with plants, whose form and structure are less standardized and more variable than those of animals, and by the fact that his skill at detecting and nurturing differences almost made it seem as though he were creating the changes himself by suitably adjusting the environ ment. This same belief was to be upheld by another plant breeder, Lysenko [1214], over half a century later, with less excuse and with more serious conse quences.
Burbank began his botanical work in 1870, when he bought a plot of ground near Lunenburg, Massachusetts. In a year or so he developed the Burbank po tato. His three older brothers had moved to California, and in 1875 Burbank fol lowed, using $150 obtained by selling his rights to the potato, settling near Santa Rosa in an Eden-like garden spot. He remained there fifty years and made it world famous. The Burbank potato meanwhile traveled in the other direc tion, for it was introduced into Ireland, to minimize the chances of a blight like the one in the 1840s that killed or drove into exile half of Ireland’s population. As might be expected in the great fruit-growing state of California, Bur bank made the development of new varieties of fruit a specialty. He devel oped no fewer than sixty varieties of plum through work that stretched over forty years. Over a period of thirty-five years he developed ten new commercial varieties of berry. He worked on pineap ples, walnuts, and almonds. Nor was he concerned only with the edible, for he developed numerous varieties of flowers that could serve no other use than to delight the eye in new and previously un known fashion. These include such ex amples as the Fire poppy, the Burbank 519 [800] KLEIN
PAVLOV [802] rose, the Shasta daisy, and the Ostrich- plume clematis. For Burbank it was all a labor of love, but he did demonstrate that living na ture, given enough care and trouble, can be modified as effectively as the inani mate world to the needs of man. [800] KLEIN, Christian Felix German mathematician Born: Düsseldorf, April 25, 1849 Died: Gottingen, June 22, 1925 Klein received his doctorate at the University of Bonn in 1868. After ser vice in the Franco-Prussian War, he re ceived a professorial appointment in 1872 at the University of Erlangen. He married a granddaughter of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. Klein’s most important mathematical work was the systematization of the non Euclidean geometries worked out by Lo- bachevski [484], Bolyai [530], and Rie- mann [670]. By using projective geome try, he showed how forms of both non Euclidean geometry and Euclidean ge ometry itself could be viewed as special cases of a more general view. This brought non-Euclidean geometry into the mainstream of mathematical thinking, since it made it no more an es oteric curiosity and put it on the same level with “ordinary” geometry. [801] KJELDAHL, Johann Gustav Christoffer (kel'dal) Danish chemist
Kjeldahl, the son of a physician, stud ied at the Technological Institute in Co penhagen. He was particularly interested in chemical analysis. When the owner of the Carlsberg brewery set up the Carls berg Laboratory, a scientific research in stitution, Kjeldahl was appointed direc tor in 1876 and held that position till his death.
Kjeldahl’s most important achievement was his devising, in 1883, a method for the analysis of the nitrogen content of organic material. Dumas [514] had al ready worked out a method but one that was long and complicated. Kjeldahl’s was much simpler and faster. By using concentrated sulfuric acid, all the nitro gen bound in organic molecules was released in the form of ammonia, the quantity of which could be easily deter mined. This Kjeldahl determination could be carried out in a specially de signed Kjeldahl flask, which first came into use in 1888. [802] PAVLOV, Ivan Petrovich (pa'vluf) Russian physiologist
1849
Died: Leningrad, February 27, 1936
Pavlov came of a family rich in priests, and originally his education was intended to make him a worthy follower of the family tradition. At the theolog ical seminary, however, he read Darwin’s [554] Origin of Species and found that his call was for natural science and not for the priesthood. He left the seminary in 1870 and studied at St. Petersburg University under Mendeleev [705] and Butlerov [676], He obtained his Ph.D. at the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy in 1883 and spent the years 1884 to 1886 in further study in Ger many, where he studied under Ludwig [597].
Back at the academy, he became in terested in the physiology of digestion and worked out the nervous mechanism controlling the secretion of the digestive glands, particularly of the stomach. In 1889 he carried on rather impressive ex periments in which he severed a dog’s gullet and led the upper end through an opening in the neck. The dog could then be fed, but the food would drop out through the open gullet and never reach the stomach. Nevertheless, the stomach’s gastric juices would flow. It seemed plain to Pavlov that nerves stimulated in the mouth carried their message to the brain, which, in turn, via other nerves, stimu lated the gastric secretion. Pavlov capped the experiment by showing that, with ap 520 [802] PAVLOV
FLEMING [803] propriate nerves cut, the dog might eat as heartily as before, but now there would be no gastric flow. Pavlov was rewarded for this work with a professorial position at the acad emy in 1890 and, as his researches were crucial in establishing the importance of the autonomic nervous system and in laying bare the details of the physiology of digestion, he received the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for 1904. Oddly enough, this was after the cen tral core of his work had been rendered partly obsolete by the work of Bayliss [902], who showed the importance of chemical stimulation over nervous stimu lation. Bayliss’s work was confirmed in Pavlov’s own laboratory, and with Pav lov’s work on nerve stimulation reduced to secondary importance, the Russian physiologist lost interest in digestion and moved on to other things, which turned out to be even more important than that for which he earned the Nobel Prize. The manner in which stimulation of nerves in the mouth by food elicited a response in the stomach is an uncondi tioned reflex. It is brought about by the construction of the nerve network with which the organism is born. Pavlov began work to see if he could impose a new pattern upon such inborn ones. Thus, a hungry dog that is shown food will salivate. That is an unconditioned reflex. If a bell is made to ring every time he is shown food, he will eventually salivate when the bell rings even though food is not shown him. The dog has as sociated the sound of the bell with the sight of food and reacts to the first as though it were the second. This is a con ditioned reflex. (Pavlov’s studies of conditioned reflexes marked an early climax to the new physiologically oriented psychology that had begun in Germany with Weber [492]. In Pavlov’s own time, the “new psychology” was being introduced to the United States by men such as William James [754] and Granville Hall [780].) Studies of the conditioned reflex led to the theory that a good part of learning and of the development of behavior was the result of conditioned reflexes of all sorts picked up in the course of life. Such behaviorist theories of psychology, popularized in the United States by Wat son [1057], were opposed to the theories of Freud [865] and those who followed him, who considered the mind more as a thing in itself. Pavlovian psychology is far more popular in the Soviet Union today than it is elsewhere. Pavlov remained in Russia after the revolution and, although he was an out spoken anti-Communist, the Soviet gov ernment sensibly left him alone and pa tiently endured his opposition. It even built him a laboratory in 1935. To the end of his life, he remained an ornament of Russian science and a showpiece of Soviet toleration. [803] FLEMING, Sir John Ambrose English electrical engineer
vember 29, 1849 Died: Sidmouth, Devonshire, April 18, 1945 Fleming, the son of a Congregational minister, graduated from University Col lege, London, in 1870. In 1877 he en tered Cambridge and worked for Max well [692], repeating Cavendish’s [307] electrical experiments, which Maxwell had recently uncovered. He held the post of professor of electrical engineering at University College from 1885. In the 1880s he served as consultant to Edison’s [788] London office in connec tion with the developing electric light in dustry and in the 1890s he worked with Marconi [1025]. He proceeded to com bine the two masters. He took up the Edison effect (the passage of electricity from a hot filament to a cold plate within an evacuated bulb) and found it to be due to the passage of the newly discovered electrons boiling off the hot filament. He found that the electrons would travel only when the plate was at tached to the positive terminal of a gen erator, for then the plate would attract the negatively charged electrons. This meant that in alternating current (where the charge on the plate was perpetually shifting from negative to positive, as the charge on the filament shifted from posi-
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