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551 [851] HAMPSON
EASTMAN [852] If anything, the steam turbines rotated too rapidly. The rotation was fine for generating electricity, but propellers were driven too quickly for maximum efficiency. In the 1890s and 1900s Par sons worked on devices to gear down the rotation, the turbines rotating at max imum speed but driving the propellers at less than a tenth the speed. He finally succeeded in that too, and the steam tur bine was complete. Parsons was knighted in 1911. In his retirement, Parsons tried un successfully to make artificial diamonds, a popular pastime of the period that also occupied Moissan [831] and Acheson [863].
[851] HAMPSON, William English inventor Born: Bebington, Cheshire, 1854 Died: London, January 1, 1926 Hampson, about whose life little is known, seems to have intended to be come a lawyer at first, but does not ap pear to have carried through with this intention. He became an engineer and inventor instead, and he is best known for having developed methods for producing quan tities of liquid air, anticipating the methods used by Linde [758] and Claude [989], The liquid air supplied by Hamp son made it possible for Ramsay [832] to discover neon, for instance. That he did not receive the credit due him may have in part been the fault of Dewar [759], who was not inclined to abandon any credit for anything and who disputed priorities acrimoniously with him on the question of the liquefaction of hydrogen. [852] EASTMAN, George American inventor Born: Waterville, New York, July 12, 1854 Died: Rochester, New York, March 14, 1932 Like Edison [788], Eastman (whose family moved to Rochester while he was still a child) was bom poor and had little chance at schooling. He was working and supporting himself at fourteen. In 1877 he became interested in pho tography when he was planning a vaca tion trip to Santo Domingo and a friend suggested he take along a camera. East man foresaw that people would take to a device that would freeze the past, pro vided the device was simple and straightforward. Photography, he de cided, would have to be divorced from the chemical laboratory, at least as far as taking the picture was concerned. Until Eastman’s time, the photo graphic plate was glass, and an emulsion of chemicals had to be smeared upon it before a photograph could be taken. The emulsion would not keep; it had to be made up on the spot, smeared over the plate, and the picture taken. As long as all that was necessary, photography would be only for a handful of profes sionals. In 1878 Eastman learned how to mix the emulsion with gelatin, smear it on the plate, and let it dry into a firm gel. Now it would keep for long periods of time and could be used when convenient. By 1880 he was in business. The glass, however, was still heavy and clumsy. In 1884 Eastman patented photographic “film” in which the gel was smeared on paper. In 1888 he began selling the Kodak camera (he invented the name, a meaningless one, as a catchy trademark), which used such flexible film though the camera weighed about two pounds, even so. The owner pressed buttons to take pictures, then sent the camera to Rochester and eventually re ceived back his photograph and a freshly loaded camera. “You press the button— we do the rest” was Kodak’s successful slogan.
(Eventually the owner would need only to give away the roll of film to be developed, and over half a century after the coming of the Kodak, Land [1344] was to make developing as automatic and almost as rapid as taking the photo graph.) In 1889 Eastman got rid of the paper and made the film out of a tougher ma terial, Hyatt’s [728] celluloid. This plas tic served as solvent for the emulsion
[853] GORGAS
TAKAMINE [855] and as an independent support. Photog raphy for the masses had come to stay. Eastman’s film also made motion pic tures possible, for Edison seized upon strips of such film as a carrier for succes sive “stills” taken in rapid succession. The great difficulty with celluloid film was its inflammability. It was always a fearful hazard in quantity. For a genera tion Eastman experimented and by 1924 cellulose acetate, far less inflammable, had replaced celluloid. As head of a large business, Eastman introduced many enlightened business practices, such as sickness benefits, re tirement annuities, and life insurance for his employees, long before such extras became general. He contributed over $100 million to various educational insti tutions, including $54 million to the Uni versity of Rochester and $19 million to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in order that others might receive the schooling he had never had. He also en dowed dental clinics in various European cities. In 1932, after a long and successful life, and facing a few last years in loneli ness and without the prospect of further accomplishment, Eastman killed himself. [853] GORGAS, William Crawford (gawi'gus) American army surgeon Born: Mobile, Alabama, October 3, 1854
Died: London, England, July 3, 1920
Gorgas was the son of a Confederate soldier and his life closely paralleled that of his fellow Southerner Reed [822]. Gorgas also obtained his degree from Bellevue (in 1879) and also entered the army (in 1880). He too was in Havana, from 1898 to 1902, combating the yel low fever menace. The high point of his life came in 1904 when, after Reed’s death, he was sent to Panama. There he placed the mosquito under such effective control that both malaria and yellow fever were wiped out. It was this, more than any en gineering feat, that made it possible to bring the building of the Panama Canal to a successful conclusion. In 1914 the canal was opened and Gorgas was made surgeon general of the U. S. Army. Afterward, he devoted him self to the fight against yellow fever in other parts of the world, notably in Ecuador. In 1950 he was elected to a place in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [854] ROOZEBOOM, Hendrik Willem Bakhuis (roh'zuh-bome) Dutch physical chemist Born: Alkmaar, October 24, 1854 Died: Amsterdam, February 8, 1907
. Roozeboom worked in a butter factory as a young man, but went on to study chemistry at the University of Leiden, graduating in 1884. He then served as professor of chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, succeeding Van’t Hoff [829] in that post in 1886. Learning of the phase rule from Van der Waals [726], he popularized it throughout Europe. He converted Gibbs’s [740] theory into practice. Gibbs had rarely experimented but Roozeboom made all sorts of measurements that served to prove the validity of the phase rule and, in addition, worked out the de tails of its application to many individual cases.
The modern chemistry of alloys could scarcely exist without an understanding of phase rule as amplified by Rooze boom.
[855] TAKAMINE, Jokichi (tah-kah- mee-nee)
Japanese-American chemist Born: Takaoka, Japan, Novem ber 3, 1854 Died: New York, New York, July 22, 1922 In the year of Takamine’s birth, Com modore Perry forced Japan to open its doors to the West, and the Japanese peo-
[856] SABATIER
SABATIER [856] pie turned out to be apt and ready pu pils. Takamine, the son of a physician, was brought up according to the Sam urai code, but proved a scientist in quite the Western style. He graduated in 1879 from the Imperial University at Tokyo as a chemical engineer. He inter ested himself in agricultural chemistry, founding the chemical fertilizer industry in Japan when he built the first super phosphate works in the land in Tokyo in 1887. In 1890, having married an American woman, he moved to the United States and established a laboratory in Clifton, New Jersey. In 1901 he isolated a sub stance from the adrenal glands that is now best known by the tradename Adrenalin, or as adrenaline, although its proper chemical name is epinephrine. The hormone concept had not yet been advanced, but eventually it came to be realized that Takamine, unknowingly, had been the first to isolate a pure hor mone.
He also isolated a starch-hydrolyzing enzyme from rice which was similar to the diastase that Payen [490] had iso lated, as the first known enzyme, nearly a century earlier. He named it Takadia- stase and devised methods for its use as a starch-digestant in industrial processes. In 1912 he negotiated with the mayor of Tokyo for the cherry trees that have ever since bloomed in Washington, D.C. [856] SABATIER, Paul (sa-ba-tyayO French chemist Bom: Carcassonne, Aude, No vember 5, 1854 Died: Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, August 14, 1941 Sabatier, bom of a poor family, ob tained his doctor’s degree in 1880 at the Collège de France, where he served as assistant to Berthelot [674]. In 1882 he joined the faculty of the University of Toulouse, earning a professorial position in 1884 and remaining there the rest of his long life. At first he taught physics and interested himself in physical chem istry. He approached organic chemistry, in which he was to achieve fame, en tirely through the failure of an experi ment he had conducted in 1897. Nickel forms one of its few volatile compounds (that is, compounds that va porize at quite low temperatures) through combination with carbon mon oxide to form nickel carbonyl. This was an interesting compound and Sabatier and an assistant reached over into or ganic chemistry to see if another volatile nickel compound could not be formed by the addition of the hydrocarbon ethyl ene. This organic compound had a dou ble bond, like carbon monoxide, and there was a chance its behavior might be similar. However, the experiment failed. When nickel was heated under ethylene, no volatile nickel ethylene compound was formed. But Sabatier and his assistant saved what gases did form for later analysis and to their surprise found that ethane was present. Ethane’s molecule was like ethylene’s, plus hydrogen atoms at the double bond. Apparently the nickel had acted as a catalyst, bringing about the addition of hydrogen to ethylene to form ethane. Sabatier switched to organic chemistry and spent the rest of his career studying catalytic hydrogenations. The work was fruitful. Until then the catalyst routinely used for hydrogen additions had been platinum or palladium, very expensive metals. If the comparatively cheap metal nickel could be used instead, hydrogena tions would no longer be confined to the laboratory but could be used in large industrial-scale processes much more eas ily. Nickel catalysis made possible the formation of edible fats such as marga rine and shortenings from inedible plant oils such as cottonseed oil in record quantity and with record economy. Through the fame of this discovery Sa batier might have gone on to the Sor bonne in Paris in 1907 to succeed Mois- san [831], but he chose to remain in the South of France. For his work on catalysis Sabatier re ceived the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemis try, sharing it with Grignard [993].
[857] RYDBERG
NEISSER [859] [857] RYDBERG, Johannes Robert (rid'bar-yeh) Swedish physicist Born: Halmstad, November 8, 1854
Died: Lund, Malmôhus, Decem ber 28, 1919 Rydberg studied at the University of Lund and received his Ph.D. in mathe matics in 1879, and then joined the fac ulty, reaching professorial status in 1897. He was primarily interested in spec troscopy and labored to make sense of the various spectral lines produced by the different elements when incandescent (as Baimer [658] did for hydrogen in 1885). Rydberg worked out a rela tionship before he learned of Balmer’s equation, and when that was called to his attention, he was able to demonstrate that Balmer’s equation was a special case of the more general relationship he him self had worked out. Even Rydberg’s equation was purely empirical. He did not manage to work out the reason why the equation existed. That had to await Bohr’s [1101] applica tion of quantum notions to atomic struc ture. Rydberg did, however, suspect the existence of regularities in the list of ele ments that were simpler and more regu lar than the atomic weights and this no tion was borne out magnificently by Moseley’s [1121] elucidation of atomic numbers.
[858] ELSTER, Johann Philipp Ludwig Julius
German physicist Born: Bad Blankenburg, Decem ber 24, 1854 Died: Bad Harzburg, Saxony, April 6, 1920 Elster worked together with Hans Gei- tel (1855-1923). They were fellow stu dents at Heidelberg and fellow teachers of physics at a secondary school near Brunswick. Beginning in 1889, they studied the photoelectric effect, by which an electric current was set up on the exposure of certain metals to light. This had been ob served for the first time, in a rather primitive fashion, in 1888 by Hertz [873], but Elster and Geitel were the first to produce practical photoelectric cells that could be used to measure the inten sity of light. They also studied the new phenome non of radioactivity after it had been re ported by Becquerel [834] in 1896 and showed that external effects did not influence the intensity of the radiation, which they were the first to characterize as caused by changes that took place within the atom. [859] NEISSER, Albert Ludwig Sigismund (ny'ser) German physician Born: Schweidnitz, Silesia (now Swidnica, Poland), January 22, 1855
Wroclaw, Poland), July 30, 1916 Neisser was the son of a physician and naturally gravitated toward medicine as a lifework. In secondary school, Ehrlich [845] was a classmate. Neisser gained his medical degree in 1877 after having proved himself a rather mediocre stu dent. As a physician, however, he did well. In 1879 he discovered the small bac terium that caused gonorrhea (and was named “gonococcus” by Ehrlich). He then traveled to Norway, where he had the opportunity to examine a number of patients suffering from leprosy and identified the bacillus responsible for that disease. A Norwegian physician, A.G.H. Hansen (1841-1912), seems to have iso lated the bacillus some years earlier and there was a dispute over priorities, but even if Neisser were the second to have seen the bacillus, he seems to have been the first to make the connection clear be tween it and the disease. He failed, however, in his studies of syphilis, and his attempts at inoculating against the disease may have spread it instead.
[860] LOWELL
TEISSERENC DE BORT [861] [860] LOWELL, Percival American astronomer
March 13, 1855 Died: Flagstaff, Arizona, Novem ber 12, 1916 Percival Lowell was a member of that aristocratic Boston family who “speak only to Cabots” while the Cabots “speak only to God.” His sister was Amy Low ell, a first-rate poet, and his brother be came president of Harvard University. After graduation with honors in 1876 from the rather inevitable Harvard, he spent some time in business and in travel in the Far East. He was interested in mathematics, however, and had dabbled in astronomy as a boy. He was greatly excited by the “canals" reported by Schiaparelli [714] to exist on Mars. On his return to the United States he exercised the privilege, as a man of inde pendent wealth, of establishing a private observatory in Arizona where the mile- high dry desert air and the remoteness from city lights made the seeing excel lent. The Lowell Observatory was opened in 1894, when Mars was quite close to the earth. For fifteen years Lowell avidly studied Mars, taking thousands of photographs of it. There was no question that he saw the canals (or thought he did). In fact, he saw far more than Schiaparelli ever did and he drew detailed pictures that eventually included over five hundred ca nals. He plotted the “oases” at which they met, recorded the fashion in which they seemed to double at times, and noted in detail the seasonal changes, which seemed to mark the ebb and flow of agriculture. All in all, he is the patron saint of the intelligent-life-on-Mars cult. At the same time Pickering [885] was almost as assiduous in his study of Mars, and though he reported straight mark ings, they were few and shifting and were not at all like the sharp, well- defined markings of Lowell. Modem as tronomers side with Pickering against Lowell and point out, as H. S. Jones [1140] did, for instance, that irregular blotches at the limit of seeing seem to affect the eyes as interconnecting straight lines. The canals are probably an optical illusion, in other words. Lowell made his mark in another re spect as well. Even after Neptune had been discovered by Leverrier [564] and J. C. Adams [615], the discrepancies in the motion of Uranus were not com pletely understood. It still wandered off its calculated orbit by a tiny amount. Lowell believed this was due to still another planet beyond Neptune. He cal culated its possible position in the sky— by its effect on Uranus—and searched with determination for what he called Planet X. He never found it, but for fourteen years after his death the search contin ued with better telescopes until it was brought to a successful conclusion by Tombaugh [1299], The new planet was named Pluto, an appropriate name for the planet farthest from the sun (as far as we now know), and it was no acci dent that the first two letters of the name are the initials of Percival Lowell. [861] TEISSERENC DE BORT, Léon Philippe (tes-rahn' duh-bawr) French meteorologist Born: Paris, November 5, 1855 Died: Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, January 2, 1913 At first Teisserenc de Bort, the son of an engineer, was employed by the Cen tral Meteorological Bureau at Paris, and he became chief meteorologist in 1892. However, he resigned in 1896 and went into business for himself, so to speak, opening a private observatory near Ver sailles.
There he was able to conduct experi ments with high-flying instrumented bal loons to his heart’s content, without worrying about official duties. He was one of the pioneers in the use of un manned balloons, which pierced new heights without endangering human life. He discovered that above seven miles or so the temperature, which drops steadily from sea level to that altitude, remained constant up to the highest points he could reach. He therefore suggested in 1902, after
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