Biographical encyclopedia
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556 [862] CROSS
ACHESON [863] years of careful measurement, that the atmosphere was divided into two layers. The lower layer, where temperature changes induced all sorts of air move ments, cloud formations, and, in short, weather, he named the troposphere (“sphere of change”) in 1908. The upper boundary of this troposphere was the tropopause. Above the tropopause, Teisserenc de Bort believed there must be a region of changelessness because the impetus of temperature difference was lacking. He suggested that different gases might lie in layers, with lighter gases floating on heav ier ones (oxygen at the bottom, nitro gen above that, the newly discovered he lium above that, and hydrogen above all). He therefore called the upper re gion the stratosphere (“sphere of layers”). Teisserenc de Bort’s theory of gas layers immediately above the tropopause has not been borne out by the rocket ex periments of the mid-twentieth century (though at far greater heights, extremely thin layers of hydrogen and helium are now known to exist), but the name stratosphere remains. Teisserenc de Bort’s was the first systematic investigation of the atmospheric heights. In fact, such is the progress of research fhat the high stratosphere is now considered part of the lower atmosphere. [862] CROSS, Charles Frederick English chemist
cember 11, 1855 Died: Hove, Sussex, April 15, 1935
Cross graduated from King’s College, London, in 1878. In 1892 he worked out a method for dissolving cellulose in carbon disulfide and squirting the viscous solution (“vis cose” he called it) out of fine holes. As the solvent evaporated, fine fibrous threads of “viscose rayon” were formed. By 1908 methods were found to squeeze the viscose through a narrow slit to form thin, transparent sheets of “cel lophane.” [863] ACHESON, Edward Goodrich American inventor Born: Washington, Pennsylvania, March 9, 1856 Died: New York, New York, July 6, 1931 Acheson was another of the self-made men in which nineteenth-century Amer ica was so rich. When he was in his teens the panic of 1872 made it neces sary for him to work and this he did, at anything he could turn his hand to, first at an iron furnace, then in a civil en gineering corps. In his spare time he oc cupied himself in electrical experi mentation. In 1880 he accepted a position in Edison’s [788] establishment at Menlo Park, which, for an electrical experi menter, represented the heights. He was Edison’s representative in Europe for a while, working with the Edison exhibit at the Paris International Exhibition in 1881 and installing the first electric lights in Italy, Belgium, and the Nether lands. He might have gone to higher posts in the Edison organization, but he preferred to continue his own research. Acheson grew interested in carbon and, as Moissan [831] was doing in France, tried to devise methods for con verting it into its most precious form, di amond. He tried heating carbon in tensely, and though he obtained no dia monds, he found something almost as valuable. In 1891 he found that carbon heated with clay yielded an extremely hard substance. He thought the sub stance was a compound of carbon and alundum (alundum being the common name for a form of aluminum oxide), and so he called it carborundum. Even tually carborundum was found to be silicon carbide, a compound of silicon and carbon. It remained for half a cen tury the hardest known substance, with the exception of diamond itself, and proved extremely useful as an abrasive. In 1895 Acheson established a factory near Niagara Falls, where he could take advantage of the power generated by Westinghouse’s [785] hydroelectric in stallations, and proceeded to manufac ture carborundum commercially. 557 [864] TAYLOR
FREUD [865] In 1899, while studying the effects of high temperature on carborundum, he prepared carbon in the form of an un precedentedly pure graphite. This lacked the beauty of diamond, but for all its dull ugliness it was endlessly valuable for the formation of electrodes and of spe cial lubricants (which Acheson devel oped in 1906) capable of withstanding high temperatures. [864] TAYLOR, Frederick Winslow American engineer
March 20, 1856 Died: Philadelphia, March 21, 1915
Taylor, the son of a lawyer, studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and intended to enter Harvard. Eye trouble, however, aborted his educational plans. He en tered the employ of a steel company, in stead, and worked his way up, step by step, till he was chief engineer in 1889. While working by day, he studied by night and obtained a degree in engineer ing from the Stevens Institute of Tech nology in 1883. He began to make useful inventions, too, of the ordinary sort, but his most important innovation was to apply the rules of engineering to the human beings working in a plant and not to the ma chines only. He attempted to rationalize the manner in which people fit into the scheme of production, counting steps, timing motions, working out ways in which waste of time and effort could be eliminated. He called this “scientific management” and spent the last years of his life as an independent consultant on this subject, organizing matters so as to have people work less to produce more. He was the first “efficiency expert.” [865] FREUD, Sigmund (froit [Ger man]; froid [English]) Austrian psychiatrist
Czechoslovakia), May 6, 1856 Died: London, England, Septem ber 23, 1939 Freud was born of Jewish parents and both his grandfather and great-grand father had been rabbis. When he was four years old, the family business failed and his family moved to Vienna. In that city, which Freud always claimed he hated, he remained to nearly the end of his life. Freud turned toward medicine, partly to escape from his penchant for general philosophy into something concrete, and in 1873 entered the University of Vienna. He emerged in 1881 with a medical degree. His family remained poor, but Sigmund was his mother’s fa vorite and his family underwent heroic sacrifices on his behalf (sacrifices that Sigmund accepted calmly as his due). He also obtained the help of a Jewish philanthropic society. In school he grew interested in neurol ogy, working on the nerve tracts and disentangling the relationships of the nerve cells as Golgi [764] and Ramon y Cajal [827] were doing, and certainly with no less skill. He also did pioneer work on the use of cocaine as a local an esthetic, but this he did not carry through and it was left for Roller [882] and Halsted [830] to introduce cocaine to medical practice. He used it for minor pains and praised it highly, which is sup posed to have contributed to a wave of cocaine addiction in Europe. (Sherlock Holmes, in the earlier stories, was de scribed as a cocaine addict about this time.) In 1885 Freud traveled to Paris, where he worked with Jean Martin Charcot [662], a French neurologist, who was in terested in hysteria and who, as much as anyone, founded the study of psychiatry as a separate medical specialty dealing with mental disorders. His interest roused, Freud began to turn from the physiological basis of neurology, the cells and nerves, to the psychological aspects, the manner in which mental disorders arise. In 1886 he entered private practice as a neurologist. A colleague was treating a patient suffering from hysteria by using the tech nique of hypnotism, which had been in troduced into medical practice by Mesmer [314] and made respectable by
[865] FREUD
FREUD [865] Braid [494]. Under hypnosis the patient talked of painful memories that, in the normally conscious state, she did not remember. In 1887 Freud adopted this method of treatment by hypnotism and began to formulate views of the mind as containing both a conscious and an un conscious level. Painful memories, or wishes and desires of which a person was ashamed, might, he believed, be re pressed, that is, stored in the uncon scious mind. There these memories and desires might still affect a person’s atti tudes and produce actions which, if solely the conscious mind were taken into account, would seem unmotivated. In the 1890s Freud abandoned hyp notism as a technique for reaching the unconscious mind. Instead, he began to make use of free association, allowing the patient to talk randomly and at will, with a minimum of guidance. In this fashion the patient was gradually put off guard and matters were revealed that, in ordinary circumstances, would be kept secret even from the patient’s own con scious mind. The advantage over hyp notism lay in the fact that the patient was at all times aware of what was going on and did not have to be informed afterward of what he had said. Ideally, once the contents of the un conscious mind were revealed, the pa tient’s reactions would no longer be un motivated to himself. With the cause and motivation of his behavior known, he could more easily avoid that behavior. This slow analysis of the contents of the mind was called psychoanalysis and it seemed a translation into psychological terms of the statement in the Gospel of St. John (8:32), “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” To Freud, dreams were highly significant, for it seemed to him that they gave away the contents of the un conscious mind (though often in highly symbolized form) in a manner not possi ble during wakefulness, when the con scious mind was more carefully on guard. In 1900 he published The Inter
practice of dream interpretation, at least as old as the biblical Joseph, gained a new meaning. However, the most sensational and controversial aspect of his work was in connection with sex. The Judeo-Christian tradition had thrown an uneasy blanket of “sin” over the question, and while this never stopped the exercise of sex in all its forms, it did inhibit scientific discus sion of the subject. The taboo had been broken two decades earlier by Krafft- Ebing [749], but it was Freud who smashed it entirely. In 1905 he published his theories on infantile sexuality and how it could persist into adulthood, bringing about abnormal sexual re sponses that could invade and influence all other aspects of life. For the first time Freud was really noticed, but the notice consisted in large part of a storm of abuse and derision. Nevertheless his theories slowly became influential. Beginning in 1902, a group of young men had begun to gather about Freud. They did not always see eye to eye with him and Freud was rather unbending in his views and not given to compromise. Men such as Adler [984] and Jung [1035] later broke away to establish schools of their own. Freud spent the final quarter century of his life collecting data to support his theories. He lived to see psychoanalysis become an important (if slow and ex pensive) adjunct of psychiatry. His long life, however, brought him, in his final decade, face to face with Nazi anti Semitism. In Austria he was reasonably safe for at least five years after Hitler’s coming to power in neighboring Ger many, protected by his age and his worldwide reputation. In 1938, however, Nazi Germany in vaded and occupied Austria, and nothing would have protected Freud any longer had he remained. With great difficulty, his removal was arranged despite the pathological antagonism of the Nazi mind. One month after the occupation of Austria, the eighty-two-year-old Freud was taken to sanctuary in London, where he spent the final year of his life. He died, finally, of the cancer of the jaw that had first afflicted him in 1923 559 [ 8 6 6 ] PEARY
TESLA [867] and for which he underwent repeated operations. [866] PEARY, Robert Edwin (peer'y) American explorer
May 6, 1856 Died: Washington, D.C., Febru ary 20, 1920 Peary graduated from Bowdoin Col lege in Maine in 1877 and began his pro fessional life in 1881 as a civil engineer in the U. S. Navy. An early tour of duty carried him to the tropics in con nection with the projected Nicaragua Canal (which has never been built). However, his imagination was seized by what he read of Greenland and that is land became his life. The explorations from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries had exposed all the world of the temperate and torrid zones and by the 1880s only the polar areas (plus some remote jungle, desert, and mountain fastnesses) were left to be penetrated by man. In 1886 Peary made his first trip to Greenland and penetrated deeper inland than anyone ever had be fore. It was not until 1891, however, that he organized an expedition for the serious exploration of hitherto-untouched northern Greenland. He explored the northern coast and proved Greenland to be an island. The northernmost section of Greenland (interestingly enough, largely free of the ice cap that covers most of the rest of the island) is called Peary Land in his honor. In the course of his explorations he discovered what is still the largest known meteorite. It weighed ninety tons and is now at the American Museum of Natu ral History in New York. Over the next dozen years, Peary made repeated trips to Greenland, learn ing to live like the Eskimos, and each time managing to penetrate closer to his ultimate goal, the North Pole. In 1909 he organized an elaborate travel party of which successive members were to turn back at periodic intervals until, at the end, Peary and his black associate, Matthew Hensen, made the final dash. They reached the pole on April 6, 1909. When Peary returned, he found that an erstwhile associate, Frederick Albert Cook, claimed to have reached the pole in 1908. There was considerable contro versy over this (which has not entirely died down even today) but most geog raphers have accepted Peary as the dis coverer (or, more correctly, the at- tainer) of the North Pole. In 1911 he was made a rear admiral of the U. S. Navy as a reward for his achievement. [867] TESLA, Nikola Croatian-American electrical engi neer
Born: Smiljan, Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of Yugoslavia), July 10, 1856
January 7, 1943 Tesla, the son of a clergyman, was himself first intended for the clergy. He was of Serbian ancestry though bom in Croatia.
He developed a taste for mathematics and science, perhaps through the influence of his illiterate mother who was extraordinarily bright and an inventor of implements about the farm and home. Tesla began his own inventing career in Austria, where he studied engineering at the University of Graz. In 1882 he went to Paris to work for the Conti nental Edison Company. Then in 1884 he emigrated to the United States, be coming an American citizen in 1891. For a time he was associated with Edison [788] himself. Edison, somewhat dictatorially, went back on a promise to pay him a sum of money for a particular invention and Tesla broke off relations at once and went into the inventing business for him self. (It should be mentioned that Tesla was a queer chap whom it was almost impossible not to offend and who was seriously neurotic. In later life he bred pigeons, on whom he lavished all the affection he was unable to give human beings.)
As an inventor, Tesla, while not quite in Edison’s class (no one ever was), nev ertheless did well. In particular, he made
[868] WILSON
THOMSON [869] alternating current practical. The great difficulty in the electrical industry of the late nineteenth century was that of trans porting electricity over wires without too much loss. It was found that elec tricity at high voltage could be trans ported efficiently and Tesla worked out transformers that could lift electricity to high voltage for transporting purposes and then drop it to low voltage for use at its destination. However, transformers would only work for alternating current, so Tesla also worked out motors that would run on alternating current. Edison, meanwhile, had committed himself thoroughly to the use of direct current (d.c.), and a long career of being always right made it impossible for him to endure being wrong. He fought the use of alternating current (a.c.) quite unscrupulously. First he lobbied New York state into adopting a.c. for its newly devised electric chair (and a.c. is indeed more efficient in electrocution than d.c.) and then he pointed with great horror to the electric chair as an example of the deadly nature of a.c. Tesla, with enduring bitterness, fought back just as hard, enlisting the help of the businessman and inventor George Westinghouse [785], and in the end the transport efficiency of a.c. won out over d.c. and the Edison prestige. In 1912 there was the intention of awarding the Nobel Prize in physics jointly to Tesla and Edison, but Tesla refused to be as sociated with Edison and the prize went to Lippmann [778], a Swedish inventor of lesser merit than either. Tesla fought a long battle just as bitterly with Marconi [1025] over priority in the invention of radio. The last quarter century of his life de generated into wild eccentricity. Even so, his achievements were great and the unit of magnetic flux density has been named the tesla in his honor. [868] WILSON, Edmund Beecher American zoologist Born: Geneva, Illinois, October 19, 1856 Died: New York, New York, March 3, 1939 Wilson, the son of a lawyer, entered Antioch College in 1873 and went on to Yale University in 1875, graduating in 1878. He then went to Johns Hopkins, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1881. By then he had grown fiercely interested in the problems of heredity and went to Europe for still further studies. He stud ied under Bateson [913] and Huxley [659] in England and under Leuckart [640] and Ludwig [597] in Germany. Back in the United States, he had his first teaching position at Williams Col lege in 1883, headed the biology depart ment at Bryn Mawr in 1885, and finally gained a professorial position and chair manship of the zoology department at Columbia in 1891. He was at all times an inspiring teacher. In his research, he devoted years to the careful study of the exact manner in which the fertilized egg of various types of animals divided in the early stages of embryo formation. His most important work, however, was in connection with the chromosomes that Flemming [762] had first noted. Once Mendel’s [638] theories had been revived by De Vries [792] and others, it had been one of Wilson’s students, Sut ton [1047], who had first made the con nection between Mendelian factors of heredity and chromosomes, but it was Wilson himself who first went into detail. He was the first to note the X and Y chromosomes, seeing that females had an XX perfect pair while the males had an XY. He thus connected chromosomes and sex determination and was quite convinced that chromosomes affected and determined other inherited charac teristics as well—which turned out to be so. [869] THOMSON, Sir Joseph John English physicist Born: Cheetham Hall, near Man chester, December 18, 1856 Died: Cambridge, August 30, 1940
Thomson, the son of a bookseller, en tered a college in Manchester at four teen, intending to take up engineering,
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