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[966] IPATIEFF IPATIEFF [966]
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[966] IPATIEFF
IPATIEFF [966] During World War I, she drove an am bulance.) Her work on radioactivity and the dra matic discovery of radium put the finish ing touches on the excitement that had begun with Roentgen’s discovery of X rays, and the whole subject of radioac tivity began to obsess physicists. Other radioactive elements were soon discov ered by men like Dorn [795] and Bolt- wood [987], who followed the trail the brilliant Polish woman had blazed. Her last decades were spent in the su pervision of the Paris Institute of Ra dium. She had made no attempt to pa tent any part of the extraction process of radium and it remained in the glamorous forefront of the news for nearly a gener ation, thanks to its ability to stave off the inroads of cancer under the proper cir cumstances. But in the end Marie died of leukemia (a form of cancer of the leukocyte-forming cells of the body) caused by overexposure to radioactive radiation. [966] IPATIEFF, Vladimir Nikolaevich (ih-pah'tyef) Russian-American chemist
1867
Died: Chicago, Illinois, Novem ber 29, 1952 Ipatieff, the son of an architect, was intended for a military career and was therefore sent to a military school, where the instruction in chemistry was rather poor. However, Ipatieff found his in struction in Mendeléev’s [705] textbook. He became an officer in the Russian Army in 1887, and in 1889, as a result of a competitive examination, entered the Mikhail Artillery Academy, where he could continue his chemical education under better conditions. Later, he lec tured in chemistry at the school. In 1897 he was allowed to go to Ger many, where he studied under Baeyer [718] in Munich, rooming with Gomberg [950] and Willstâtter [1009], Gomberg, who was Russian-born, could speak Rus sian, which was convenient indeed for Ipatieff. At Munich, the young Russian determined the structure of isoprene, a hydrocarbon that is the basic unit of the rubber molecule. This introduced him to hydrocarbons, which were to be the love of his life. He went on to study explosives for a few months in France (after all, he was an artillery man) and in 1899 became a professor of chemistry and explosives at the Mikhail Artillery Academy. In 1900 he made his great discovery that organic reactions taking place at high tempera tures could be influenced in their course by varying the nature of the substance with which they were in contact. Until then it had been believed that at high temperatures, organic molecules broke into pieces crazily and at random, but Ipatieff learned to direct them. Through the years he worked out the effect of different catalysts and the details of vari ous reactions. Despite the lack of the for mal academic prerequisites, his work earned him a Ph.D. at the University of St. Petersburg in 1908. World War I and the Russian Revolu tion interrupted his work. He had held important administrative posts during the war, coordinating Russia’s chemical industries. The revolutionaries naturally held him under suspicion as a result, but his talents were necessary to the country under any government. He continued to work for the Soviets, hoping to contrib ute to the rebuilding of Russia from the devastation of war and to aid its strenuous attempt at industrialization. Ipatieff was not, however, in sympathy with Communism and toward the end of the 1920s he began to fear for his safety. In 1930 he attended a chemical confer ence in Berlin and upon receiving an offer of a job in the United States de cided not to return to the Soviet Union. In Chicago, Illinois, he began the third phase of his life and once again proved successful. Working for the Universal Oil Product Company in Chicago, he ap plied his catalyzed high-temperature processes to the tailor-making of new hydrocarbon mixtures out of old. This had become a matter of vital im portance, for gasoline, a hydrocarbon mixture, was the power source of the au tomobile, which, thanks to Henry Ford
[967] SØRENSEN
RICHARDS [968] [929], was now a factor of prime impor tance on the social scene. For gasoline to work most efficiently in a motor, it must burn smoothly and evenly. Too rapid burning produced a damaging and waste ful “knock.” Certain types of hydrocar bons were less subject to knock than others were, and the less knock a gaso line mixture gave rise to, the higher its “octane rating.” Ipatieff showed how poor gasoline could be converted into good “high octane” gasoline. The only comparable victory in the battle against knock was that of Midgley [1132] and his tetraethyl lead. Ipatieff’s work was also important in the development of aviation gasoline for use in airplanes during World War II. Ten days after his death (soon after his eighty-fifth birthday) his wife died too. They had been married sixty years. Ipatieff had been expelled from the So viet Academy of Sciences in 1931 as a traitor, but he was exonerated and post humously reinstated in 1965. [967] SØRENSEN, Søren Peter Lauritz (siff ren-sen) Danish chemist
Zealand, January 9, 1868 Died: Copenhagen, February 12, 1939
Sørensen, the son of a farmer, ob tained his Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen in 1899, took a post with the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenha gen, and remained there the rest of his life.
His chief claim to fame is his new way of looking at the concentration of the hydrogen ion. The hydrogen ion, smallest and nimblest of all ions, is al ways present in any system that contains water, which means it is present in al most all systems that concern the chem ist and biochemist. Many reactions vary greatly in speed and even in nature, ac cording to the concentration of the hy drogen ion present. In 1909 Sørensen suggested that chem ists deal with the negative logarithm of that concentration, and introduced the expression pH for this. A chemist, in stead of speaking of a hydrogen ion con centration of 10-7 moles per liter, would speak of a pH of 7. This alter ation in view changed no facts, of course, but it simplified many mathe matical and graphic representations and made it easier to grasp and understand numerous relationships in chemistry and biochemistry. [968] RICHARDS, Theodore William American chemist Born: Germantown, Pennsylvania, January 31, 1868 Died: Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2, 1928 Richards’ father was a painter and his mother was a poet, and he himself in herited talents in both directions. In ad dition, he was interested in music and, of course, in science. He was educated at Haverford where his first interest was astronomy but poor eyesight caused him to turn to chemistry instead. He graduated in 1885 at the head of his class, then went on to Har vard, where he received his doctor’s de gree in 1888. In his doctoral thesis he undertook to determine a more accurate value for the ratio of the atomic weight of oxygen to that of hydrogen, a prob lem also preoccupying Rayleigh [760] across the ocean. After obtaining his de gree Richards continued his studies in Germany, studying under Viktor Meyer [796], Ostwald [840], and Nernst [936]. He was offered a professorship at Gottingen, but he returned to the United States in 1894 to take up a professorship in chemistry at Harvard. His professional life was dedicated to determining with the greatest possible ac curacy the atomic weights of the various elements. Over nearly three decades he and his students established the atomic weight of some sixty elements with an accuracy that seemed to represent the limit of what could be done with purely chemical methods. He surpassed even the achievements of Stas [579], lowering the atomic weight of silver, for instance, from Stas’s value of 107.93 to the more 618 [969] MILLIKAN
MILLIKAN [969] nearly correct 107.88, and for his atomic weight determinations Richards received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1914. His work brought the age of classical atomic weight determinations to an end, and marked the initiation of a new age as well. In 1913 he began the determi nation of the atomic weights of lead from different minerals and detected small but definite differences. This pro vided experimental verification of the predictions of Soddy [1052], who had, shortly before, advanced the theory of isotopes. The existence of isotopes, thus es tablished by Soddy’s physical approach and Richards’ chemical one, showed that ordinary atomic weights, though still a matter of importance for chemical calcu lations, were no longer fundamental physical data. Attention turned to the measurement of the mass of individual atomic species by electromagnetic methods. Atomic weights were more ac curately determined in this fashion than they could possibly be by the older chemical methods and Richards’ work paled in the face of the new era of atomic physics. [969] MILLIKAN, Robert Andrews American physicist Born: Morrison, Illinois, March 22, 1868 Died: Pasadena, California, De cember 19, 1953 During his undergraduate years at Oberlin College, from which he gradu ated in 1891, after studying Greek, Mil likan had only a mild interest in physics. After his graduation, however, he went through a change of heart. He taught physics at the school for a couple of years (for lack of any formally qualified teacher) while taking his master’s degree and fell in love with the subject. He then obtained his doctorate in 1895 at Colum bia University where he studied under Pupin [891], He was the first Ph.D. in physics to come out of Columbia. (The United States was only then, belatedly, beginning to move forward in science ed ucation.) After postdoctoral work in Ger many under Planck [887] and Nernst [936], he obtained a professorial appoint ment at the University of Chicago in 1910, and there he worked with Michel- son [835]. In 1906 Millikan set about his most famous work, the determination of the size of the electric charge on a single electron. To do this he followed the course of tiny electrically charged water droplets falling through air under the influence of gravity against the pull of a charged plate above. By 1911 he had switched to oil droplets to avoid the effect of evaporation. Every once in a while such a droplet would attach to itself an ion which Mil likan produced in the chamber by expos ing it to X rays. With the ion added, the effect of the charged plate above was suddenly strengthened and the droplet would fall more slowly or, perhaps, even rise. The minimum change in motion Millikan felt to be due to the addition of a single electronic charge. By balancing the effects of the electromagnetic attrac tion upward and the gravitational attrac tion downward both before and after such an addition, Millikan was able to calculate the charge on the single elec tron. He also showed that the electric charge existed only as a whole number of units of that charge. It was the final proof of the particulate nature of elec tricity, a century after Faraday’s [474] work had first pointed the way. This very spectacular (and, once ex plained, engagingly simple) experiment earned for Millikan the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923. The award also men tioned the careful experimental work he performed to verify the equations de duced theoretically by Einstein [1064] in connection with the photoelectric effect. He also used this work to calculate the value of Planck’s constant and got re sults that checked Planck’s own calcula tions closely. During World War I he served in the Army Signal Corps with the rank of lieu tenant-colonel. By 1921 Millikan had transferred to the California Institute of Technology, where he remained until his retirement and where he grew interested in the radi 619 [970] HAYFORD
SABINE [972] ation that V. F. Hess [1088] had de tected as arising from outer space. In 1925 Millikan named the radiation “cos mic rays,” the name used ever since. Millikan tested the intensity of the ra diation in the upper atmosphere by plane and balloon, and below the surface, too, by sinking instruments to the bottom of lakes. This work was carried on with no table results by Millikan’s pupil Ander son [1292], For many years Millikan maintained that cosmic rays were a form of electro magnetic radiation like gamma rays, only more energetic. He believed also that cosmic rays originated in the out skirts of the universe where matter was being created. It was the “birth cry” of matter. Millikan was one of the rela tively small number of scientists who ac tively fought to reconcile religion and science. He was the son of a Congre gational minister and was deeply reli gious himself. Since his thought that matter was still being created had reli gious significance to him (“The Creator is still on the job,” he said), he clung to it, and to the wave nature of cosmic rays, even when the evidence presented by Compton [1159] and others made it quite certain that cosmic rays were par ticulate in nature and were, for the most part, extremely energetic protons. Although a conservative Republican in domestic politics, he was no isolationist in the dangerous early years of World War II, but actively promoted aid to the Allies. [970] HAYFORD, John Fillmore American engineer Born: Rouses Point, New York, May 19, 1868 Died: Evanston, Illinois, March 10, 1925 Hayford graduated from Cornell Uni versity as a civil engineer in 1889. He joined the U. S. Coast and Geodesic Sur vey and then in 1909 became director of the College of Engineering at North western University in Evanston. He was primarily interested in geod esy, the careful calculation of the pre cise shape of the earth. The methods he used in 1900 and thereafter initiated the modern practice of geodesy. Hayford is best known for his estab lishment of the principle of isostasy: the idea that elevated regions of the earth’s crust (mountain ranges, for instance) are less dense than low-lying regions and, in essence, float on the denser, deeper layers. This is now accepted, with modifications, and has helped greatly with the understanding of the earth’s crust as a whole. [971] SCOTT, Robert Falcon English explorer
Plymouth), Devonshire, June 6, 1868
29, 1912 Scott entered the British navy in 1882. As a naval officer he was in successful command of an Antarctic expedition from 1900 to 1904. In 1909, after Peary’s [866] discovery of the North Pole, he, like Amundsen [1008], was anxious to reach the South Pole. Here, however, every variety of bad luck as sailed him and his expedition. Bad weather delayed them and when they reached the pole on January 17, 1912, after traveling 1842 miles by sledge, they found Amundsen’s marker already there. Bad weather continued on the way back and Scott and his party died in the frozen wasteland of Antarctica. [972] SABINE, Wallace Clement Ware American physicist Born: Richwood, Ohio, June 13, 1868
Died: Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 10, 1919 Sabine was the son of a farmer who had held state office and who had been hit hard by the Panic of 1873. He gradu ated from Ohio University in 1886 and then went on to Harvard, where he did not obtain a Ph.D. but where, in 1890, he joined the faculty, attaining profes sorial status in 1905. 620 [973] LANDSTEINER LANDSTEINER
In 1895 Harvard opened a brand-new building, with a fine lecture room which had only one trifling flaw: the lecturer could not be heard because of excessive reverberation. Sabine was asked to study the problem and he did, even going so far as to photograph sound waves by the changes in light refraction they pro duced. (The photography of sound waves was developed further by D. C. Miller [953].) By his studies Sabine founded the sci ence of architectural acoustics and what was until then a hit-and-miss affair be came a matter of calculation and fore thought. The first structure designed ac cording to his principles was the Boston Symphony Hall, which opened on Octo ber 15, 1900. It proved a great success. Sabine found that he could measure the absorptivity of sound in a particular room in terms of the area of open win dow, since sound that escaped outdoors was just as lost as sound absorbed by curtains or drapery. He measured the ab sorptivity of many materials by compar ing it with the absorptivity of a standard open window, in terms of duration of re verberation. He found that the duration of reverberation multiplied by the total absorptivity of the room was a constant and that this constant varied in propor tion to the volume of the room. This is Sabine’s law and it has formed the basis for the architectural design of acoustically useful rooms—those that have enough reverberation to give strength and body to sound but not so much reverberation as to interfere with hearing. [973] LANDSTEINER, Karl Austrian-American physician
1868
Died: New York, New York, June 26, 1943 Landsteiner, the son of a newspaper publisher, obtained his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1891. He had a thorough grounding in chemistry, working under Emil Fischer [833], among others. When he turned to bacte riology and immunology afterward, he approached it with a chemical turn of mind. His key discovery was made in 1900 in connection with the existence of different types of human blood. It had always been a part of folk wisdom that blood differed from individual to individ ual and that this difference was somehow inherited, but folk wisdom had the de tails all wrong. Occasional physicians throughout history had tried to make up for possibly fatal blood loss by trans ferring blood from an animal or a healthy man into the veins of the patient. Sometimes it was helpful, but often death was actually hastened. Most Euro pean nations had, by the end of the nine teenth century, prohibited blood transfu sions.
By raising folk wisdom to a far more sophisticated level of insight, Landsteiner made transfusions safe. He discovered that human blood differed in the capac ity of serum to agglutinate red cells (that is, to cause them to clump to gether). One sample of serum might clump red cells from person A but not from person B. Another sample of serum might clump red cells from person B but not from person A. Still another sample might clump both, and yet another might clump neither. By 1902 Landsteiner and his group had clearly divided human blood into four blood groups, which he named A, B, AB, and O. Once this was done, it was a simple task to show that in certain combina tions, transfusions were permissible, while in others the incoming red cells would be agglutinated with possibly fatal results. Once patient and donor were blood-typed beforehand, transfusion could be made safe, and, in fact, it at once became an important adjunct to medical practice. By 1910 it was discovered that these blood groups were inherited according to Mendel’s [638] laws and through studies on large populations they could be used as tools by men such as Boyd [1264] to help settle paternity disputes, to study past migrations, and to work out “races” on a basis that was more logical and use ful than those used by Retzius [498] a century earlier. |
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