Biographical encyclopedia
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716 [1129] BYRD
RAMAN [1130]
fection would be badly needed for wounded soldiers. Waksman, in 1941, coined the term “antibiotic” (“against life”) for the chemicals, obtained from microor ganisms, which killed bacteria, and he began to look for such chemicals. Dubos’ agent and penicillin were both effective only toward Gram [841] -posi tive bacteria and did not affect Gram negative ones. Waksman was therefore particularly interested in some substance that would combat the latter group. He happened to have a pet mold, so to speak, of the Streptomyces family, one that he had been studying ever since the first days of his graduate work. From it, in 1943, he finally isolated an antibiotic effective against Gram-negative bacteria and marketed it as Streptomycin. It was first successfully used on a human being on May 12, 1945. For this discovery Waksman was awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize in medi cine and physiology. He turned the prize money over to a research foundation at Rutgers. Streptomycin is a little too toxic for convenience, but its finding initiated a strenuous and systematic search among soil microorganisms for additional antibi otics and it was not long before the tet racyclines were discovered by Duggar [ 1010
]. [1129] BYRD, Richard Evelyn American explorer
October 25, 1888 Died: Boston, Massachusetts, March 11, 1957 Of a distinguished Virginia family (his older brother was Virginia’s longtime senator Harry F. Byrd), Richard E. Byrd forecast his career when he made a trip around the world, unattended, at the age of twelve. He graduated from the U. S. Naval Academy in 1912 but retired from active service in 1916 because of an injury suffered on the playing field. During World War I, he became an air pilot and in 1921 crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a dirigible. In 1925 he took part in his first polar expedition and in 1926 was the first to fly over the North Pole by airplane. He then turned to the Antarctic. The attainment of the South Pole by Amund sen [1008] and by Scott [971], though great feats, was only a beginning. The entire continent of Antarctica remained untouched, the largest blank spot re maining on the map of the world, five million square miles of uninhabited land. In 1928 Byrd established his camp, Little America, on the ice off Antarc tica’s shoreline and flew over the South Pole by plane. He was made a rear ad miral by act of Congress as a result and in 1933 to 1935 conducted a still more extensive expedition to Antarctica, ob serving and mapping many areas of the frozen continent. During 1934 he spent five months alone in Antarctica. A third, fourth, and fifth expedition followed, the last in 1955, when he was in his late sixties. No one man did more to map Antarctica. It is pleasant to re cord that despite his many forays into the polar areas he died at home, unlike Amundsen and Scott. He died on the eve of the Geophysical Year, which opened a concentrated scientific attack on the Antarctic continent. [1130] RAMAN, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata (rah'man) Indian physicist Born: Tiruchirappalli (Trichinop- oly), Madras, November 7, 1888 Died: Bangalore, November 21, 1970
Raman was the descendant of a long line of landholders, and the son of a physics professor. His education took place entirely within India and he gradu ated from the Presidency College in Madras in 1904 at the age of sixteen. He obtained his master’s degree, with highest honors, in 1907. Since there was virtually no chance of a scientific educa tion in India at the time, and ill health prevented him from seeking further edu cation in England, Raman took a job with the civil service after passing a competitive examination for the post in 1903. Like Einstein [1064] under similar 717
[1131] KARRER
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circumstances, he labored at science in his spare time; he helped found the In dian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1909. Eventually he came to the attention of the University of Cal cutta, which in 1917 offered him a pro fessorship in physics. After Compton’s [1159] discovery of the Compton effect, Heisenberg [1245] in 1925 predicted that a similar effect ought to be found in the case of visible light. Raman had already been investi gating light scattering and had come to the same conclusion before Heisenberg had made his suggestion and even before Compton’s work. In 1928 he definitely showed that scat tered light had weak components of changed wavelength so that photons of visible light, like those of X rays, had particulate properties. Furthermore, the exact wavelengths produced in the scat tering depended on the nature of the molecules doing the scattering. For this reason, Raman spectra proved to be most useful in determining some of the fine details of molecular structure. As a result of this discovery Raman was knighted by the British Government in 1929, and in 1930 was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences and he used the money to buy several hundred diamonds for laboratory use. In 1947 he became the director of the Raman Research Institute at Banga lore in India. Throughout his life, Raman, remem bering his own early struggle, labored ceaselessly to build up scientific research and education in India, training more than five hundred young Indians to hold important positions in science and educa tion at home and abroad. [1131] KARRER, Paul Swiss chemist Born: Moscow, Russia, April 21, 1889
Died: Zurich, June 18, 1971 Karrer was born in Russia of Swiss parents, his father being a dentist who was practicing there. The family re turned to Switzerland in 1892. There Karrer attended the University of Ziirich, serving as assistant to Alfred Werner [960]. In 1911, after obtaining his Ph.D., he journeyed to Frankfurt- am-Main, where he worked with Ehrlich [845], returning to Ziirich as a professor in 1918 and succeeding Werner in 1919. He remained there till his retirement in 1959.
Karrer worked on a large variety of problems in organic chemistry, but he is most famous for his achievements in connection with vitamins. In the early 1930s he was one of those who most ad vanced the study of the carotenoids, the yellow-orange-red coloring matters in such food items as carrots, sweet pota toes, egg yolk, and tomatoes, and in such nonedible objects as lobster shells and human skin. He isolated several new varieties and proved the structure of the best-known examples. Most important of all, he showed in 1931 that vitamin A is related to carot enoids in structure (in fact, it resembles half a molecule of a typical carotenoid). This was finally established by the actual synthesis of vitamin A by Karrer and his group. Others, such as Kuhn [1233], also worked out schemes of synthesis. Karrer synthesized other vitamins too: vitamin B2 (riboflavin) in 1935 and vita min E (tocopherol) in 1938. Such work (considering the complications of the structure of most vitamins) requires con siderable virtuosity in the chemist, but it is not merely a chemical jigsaw puzzle to be solved for amusement only. Synthesis is the final step in proving molecular structure, and this synthesis in particular led to a better understanding of the role of the vitamin in metabolism, as men like Elvehjem [1240] were about to show. For his work Karrer received the 1937 Nobel Prize in chemistry, sharing it with Haworth [1087], [1132] MIDGLEY, Thomas, Jr. American chemist Born: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May 18, 1889 Died: Worthington, Ohio, Novem ber 2, 1944 718
[1133] GUTENBERG ZWORYKIN [1134]
At Cornell, Midgley, the son of an in ventor, took his degree in mechanical en gineering, receiving his degree in that field in 1911. Working for the Dayton Engineering Company from 1916, he grew interested in finding something to prevent fuel knock. Midgley thought a red dye might cause the fuel to absorb heat more smoothly and thus prevent knock. He tried iodine and that held down the knock, but it was not the color that did it, for colorless ethyl iodide was even better.
Midgley decided he needed to know chemistry and educated himself for years in that subject. He narrowed down his search by using the periodic table of Mendeleev [705] and considering only elements near those already proved to exist in compounds with antiknock prop erties. In 1921 he came across tet raethyl lead. It is still the best antiknock known.
In the late 1920s a new problem came up. Home refrigeration was blossoming, but the most common refrigerants were ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide, all poisonous. What was needed was something neither poisonous nor inflammable and yet was a gas easily liquefied by pressure alone. In 1930 Midgley prepared difluorodichlorometh- ane (Freon). He demonstrated its safety to an audience of chemists by taking in a deep lungful and letting it trickle out over a lighted candle, which was put out. Freon is now universally used in home refrigerators, freezers, and air condi tioners.
In 1940 Midgley was paralyzed by an attack of polio. He worked up a harness with pulleys to enable him to get out of bed but in 1944 tragically strangled him self in that harness. [1133] GUTENBERG, Beno German-American geologist
June 4, 1889 Died: Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960 Gutenberg, the son of a soap manufac turer, obtained his Ph.D. in 1911 at the University of Gottingen. He came to the United States in 1930 and became an American citizen in 1936. While in the United States he taught at the California Institute of Technology. Gutenberg worked on the speed of propagation of earthquake waves. He was the first to explain satisfactorily the existence of the “shadow zone” where earthquake waves are not felt. This zone forms a band encircling the earth at a fixed distance from the epicenter of the earthquake. Gutenberg in 1913 postu lated the existence of a core at the center of the earth about 2,100 miles in radius. Earthquake waves entering it are re fracted away from the shadow zone. From the fact that transverse waves do not penetrate the core at all, it was as sumed to be liquid. From considerations of density and from the composition of many meterorites, the suggestion has been widely accepted among geologists that this liquid core is iron-nickel (in the proportion of 9 to 1) in composition. The sharp boundary between the core and the rocky mantle that lies above it is called the Gutenberg discontinuity. [1134] ZWORYKIN, Vladimir Kosma (zwawr'ih-kin) Russian-American physicist
1889
Zworykin, the son of a river-boat mer chant, received a degree in electrical en gineering from the St. Petersburg Insti tute of Technology in 1912. He traveled to France to do graduate work under Langevin [1000], but on the outbreak of World War I, he returned to Russia. During the war, he served as a radio officer with the Russian forces. The com ing of the Russian Revolution sent him away again, this time permanently. In 1919 he arrived in the United States, and was naturalized in 1924. He worked for Westinghouse Electric Com pany and attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1926. Zworykin was fascinated by the cathode-ray tube; he realized that the motion of its electron beams was so fast 719
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that an appropriately varying magnetic field could cause it to scan (that is, pass its beam over every part of) a picture in a small fraction of a second. He pat ented the idea in 1928 and became di rector of research at the Radio Corpora tion of America (RCA) in 1929 and vice-president in 1947. By 1938 he had developed the first practical television camera, which he called the iconoscope. In the iconoscope the rear of the camera is coated with a large number of tiny cesium-siiver drop lets. Each emits electrons as the light beam scans it, in proportion to the brightness of this light, and the electrons in a television tube are controlled by the electrons in the iconoscope. As the elec trons in the tube scan its fluorescent screen, the original scene scanned by the iconoscope is reproduced. Refinements and improvements were later added by RCA (four million dol lars’ worth, in fact) and in the end tele vision proved a practical home device. Even with the delays introduced by World War II, it took over in the 1950s, superseding radio and the movies as the premier entertainment medium. Zworykin also grew interested in an al lied instrument, one that had been built by German physicists in crude form. It was designed to alter electron beams magnetically, not for scanning purposes, but in order to focus them. De Broglie’s [1157] theories had shown that electrons possessed associated matter waves with a wavelength far smaller than that of ordi nary light waves. Since the amount by which any object can be magnified de pends on the wavelength of the radiation with which it is viewed, electrons could be used for far higher magnifications than light beams could. Zworykin’s modification of the instru ment made it into a practical and useful electron microscope. By 1939 he had a model that could make enlargements fifty times as great as those of the best optical microscopes. This device allowed the biologist and the biochemist to enter the world of viruses and protein mole cules, which, for the first time, man now was able to see. [1135] COSTER, Dirk Dutch physicist Born: Amsterdam, October 5, 1889
Died: Groningen, February 12, 1950
Coster obtained his Ph.D. at the Uni versity of Leiden in 1922, then went to the University of Copenhagen for post doctoral work. At Copenhagen, in collaboration with Hevesy [1100], Coster used his own ex perience in Moseley’s [1121] method of X-ray analysis to discover the element hafnium. The next year he accepted a professorship of physics at the University of Groningen, and there he remained for the rest of his professional life. He died of a progressive spinal disease that slowly reduced him to paralysis. [1136] HUBBLE, Edwin Powell American astronomer Born: Marshfield, Missouri, November 20, 1889 Died: San Marino, California, September 28, 1953 Hubble, the son of a lawyer, was inter ested in law to begin with and, as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1910, took his degree in that field. His interest, how ever, had already begun to turn to as tronomy under the influence of Millikan [969] and Hale [974]. Finding himself ir resistibly attracted to it still, he aban doned law and worked at Yerkes Obser vatory from 1914 to 1917. During World War I he served in France, volunteering as an infantry pri vate and rising to the rank of major. In 1919 he took a post he had been offered before he had gone off to war and began work at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he had at his disposal the 100-inch telescope, and where he re mained for the rest of his life. His interest turned to the patches of luminous fog or nebulae, some of which had first been systematically observed by Messier [305] a century and a half be fore and which were still like so many question marks in the sky. By this time, 7 2 0
[1136] HUBBLE
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the dimensions of our galaxy (the vast group of stars of which our sun is one) had been correctly worked out by Shap- ley [1102], but the question still re mained whether anything beside the Magellanic Clouds, which had been studied by Leavitt [975], lay outside the galaxy.
Suspicion turned to the nebulae. Some of these were undoubtedly clouds of dust and gas illuminated by stars shining within them, and were definitely part of our galaxy. The luminosity of others, however, like the Andromeda nebula (M31 on the Messier list), could not be attributed to a content of visible stars. If stars were there, they were a large mass of extremely dim ones, producing an effect like that in our Milky Way. Since the Andromeda nebula was dimmer than the Milky Way, it would have to be much farther. Some novas had been located in the Andromeda nebula but, until Hubble’s time, never any ordinary stars. In 1924 Hubble and his giant telescope (the larg est of its day) were finally able to en large the nebulosity to the point of mak ing out stars within it. Hubble went on to show that some of the stars were, in deed, Cepheid variables. Using the period-luminosity law of Shapley and Leavitt, he concluded that the Androm eda nebula was some 800,000 light- years away, eight times the distance of the farthest star of our own galaxy. (Twenty years later, this was found to be an underestimate.) There was no question that the Andromeda nebula lay beyond our own galaxy. Other nebulae were placed farther still, their distance ranging out into the bil lions of light-years. In this way Hubble founded the study of the universe be yond our own galaxy and gave the first indication of the existence of what he called “extragalactic nebulae” (objects we now know to exist in the tens of bil lions). Shapley later made the logical suggestion that the extragalactic nebulae be called galaxies, emphasizing the fact that our own galaxy (sometimes called the Milky Way Galaxy) was only one of many.
Hubble went on to classify the galaxies according to shape and to make sugges tions as to the possible course of their evolution. The grandest result of his re searches was his analysis in 1929 of the radial velocities of the galaxies, which had been measured by Slipher [1038]. Hubble suggested that the speed at which a galaxy receded from us was directly proportional to its distance. This could best be explained by supposing that the universe was steadily expanding, as Sitter [1004] had already theorized. If it was, the distance between all galaxies was steadily increasing. And in that case, all the galaxies would seem to be reced ing from an observer no matter which galaxy served as his observation point. Furthermore, at some vast distance from ourselves, the velocity of recession should attain the speed of light and nei ther light nor any other form of com munication could reach us from any of those galaxies or others still more dis tant. This distance would represent the effective Hubble radius of that portion of the universe that we can come to know. The Hubble radius of the universe has been estimated at 13 billion light-years. To put it another way, the knowable uni verse is a sphere with a diameter of 26 billion light-years. If Hubble’s suggestion was correct, then the speed of recession could be used to determine the distance of a nebula (a yardstick even mightier than Leavitt’s Cepheids). From the distance, the true size of the galaxy could then be deter mined. When this was done, the various galaxies all proved to be markedly smaller than our own Milky Way Gal axy. Furthermore, in 1931 Hubble stud ied the globular clusters of the Androm eda galaxy (no longer “nebula”), which resembled those of our own galaxy in being distributed about the galactic center—this being strong evidence in favor of the assumption that Shapley used to determine the size and shape of our own galaxy. Hubble found that the Andromeda clusters were markedly smaller than our own. This unusual size of our own galaxy proved an illusion, based on an error of the period-luminosity curve, which Baade [1163] was to correct a decade later. 721
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Reversing the expanding universe would bring all the galaxies together about two billion years ago, if Hubble’s original figures are accepted. This length of time was too short for geologists, who were certain that the earth itself had been in existence for at least three billion years. This discrepancy, too, was cor rected by Baade, and in favor of the ge ologists. All the vast cosmogonic schemes of today, schemes designed to account for the origin and development of the uni verse, must take into account and ex plain the expansion of the universe or, at the very least, explain why it seems to expand, if the fact itself is denied. The simplest explanation is that the universe expands because at some time in the far past it exploded, the “big bang” theory favored by Lemaître [1174] and Gamow [1278].
Hubble’s work on the recession of the galaxies has been carried on by Huma- son [1149]. When the United States entered World War H, Hubble, an active anti-Nazi, tried to join the army again but was per suaded that he could do more in war- related research. When the 200-inch telescope was in stalled at Mount Palomar, Hubble was given the honor of being the first to use it.
[1137] ADRIAN, Edgar Douglas Baron
English physiologist Born: London, November 30, 1889
Died: London, August 4, 1977 Adrian was educated at Trinity Col lege, Cambridge, obtaining his medical degree there in 1915. He served as a physician in the British armed forces during World War I, then returned as a member of the faculty at Trinity, gaining a professorship in 1937 and becoming master of the college in 1951. He worked on nerve impulses from sense organs, measuring changes in the electropotential with greater delicacy than had been managed by earlier re searchers. Eventually, he was able to de tect and measure the impulses from sin gle nerve fibers, and for this he shared with Sherrington [881] the 1932 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. After ward, he worked on the electropotential of the brain itself, contributing to an un derstanding of epilepsy and to the possi ble location of cerebral lesions. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1950 and was raised to the peerage in 1955 as Baron Adrian of Cambridge. [1138] HOLMES, Arthur English geologist Born: Hebbum on Tyne, Dur ham, January 14, 1890 Died: London, September 20, 1965
Holmes studied at Imperial College of Science in London under Rayleigh [760] but turned from physics to geology by the time of his graduation in 1910. His lifework was that of making use of radioactive transformation to estimate the age of the rocks, in line with the sug gestion of Boltwood [987]. Holmes clearly showed that radioactive heat completely invalidated Kelvin’s [652] es timate of a short-lived earth. To begin with, Holmes found rocks that were 1,600 million years old, more than sixty times the age Kelvin had allowed. By the time he had worked out his final scale, an age of 4,600 million years had been accepted for the earth, and, thanks to the work of Paneth [1118] on meteorites, for the solar system generally. [1139] BUSH, Vannevar American electrical engineer
March 11, 1890 Died: Belmont, Massachusetts, June 28, 1974 Bush, the son of a minister, was edu cated in the Boston area, doing his un dergraduate work at Tufts University and obtaining his doctorate at the Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology and 722
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Harvard University in 1916. He taught at Tufts for a few years but in 1919 ac cepted a professorial position at M.I.T. In 1925 Bush and his colleagues con structed a machine capable of solving differential equations. Kelvin [652] had worked out the theory for such a ma chine a half century before, but Bush was the first to construct one and to carry forward the abortive attempts of Babbage [481], a half century earlier still, to build a computer. Bush’s ma chine was, in fact, the first analogue computer, and more elaborate versions were built at M.I.T. over the next decade and a half. From 1939 to 1955 he was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. During World War II further impor tant advances were made both in theory and practice. Norbert Wiener [1175] de veloped the science of cybernetics, which guided men in the construction of com puters, while electronic switches (much faster) replaced mechanical ones. The first electronic computer (Eniac) was built in 1946, and since then extremely advanced and sophisticated computers of all varieties have been built in consid erable number. It is through such devices that scientists can make routine calcula tions that would ordinarily take prohibi tive time. (As trivial examples, pi can be calculated to 10,000 places in a matter of a few hours, and election results can be predicted quickly from initial voting figures. More significantly, perhaps, the calculations required to work out the orbit of Mars, which took Kepler [169] four years, according to his own report, were repeated by computer in 1964 in eight seconds!) Industries are using computers and al lied instruments to control and guide production and administration with a minimum of human interference. This trend (usually referred to as automa tion) threatens a Second Industrial Rev olution with consequences as unsettling and, perhaps, unforeseen as those of the first two centuries earlier. In 1940 Bush was made chairman of the National Defense Research Commit tee, acting as coordinator of scientific research in connection with national de fense. (A year later the Japanese were to bomb the United States into World War II.) Among other things Bush was in charge of the research on uranium, in which the United States Government grew interested after Einstein [1064] sent his letter to President Roosevelt. This area of research grew broader and more important and in 1942 Bush wrote an optimistic report, which re sulted in the establishment, on August 13, 1942, of what became popularly known as the Manhattan Project after the war. It was this scientific organi zation that developed and exploded the first atomic bomb not quite three years after its organization. [1140] JONES, Sir Harold Spencer English astronomer Born: London, March 29, 1890 Died: London, November 3, 1960 Jones, the son of an accountant, was educated at Cambridge, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1911 and his doctorate in 1925. From 1913 to 1923 he was assistant to the astronomer royal at Greenwich and thereafter spent a de cade at the observatory in South Africa where, nearly a century earlier, Hender son [505] had determined the distance of Alpha Centauri. Jones’s ambition was much more modest: He wanted to deter mine the distance of the sun. Through the 1920s he made delicate measurements of the manner in which the moon occulted stars, measurements from which the solar distance could be deduced. However, his major effort came in 1931, in connection with the asteroid Eros.
Galle [573] nearly a century before had first suggested that the parallax of asteroids be measured to help determine the scale of the solar system. At the time, however, the only known asteroids were too far to yield parallaxes with sufficient accuracy. Eros, however, was discovered in 1898 and found to have an orbit that carried it closer to the earth than any object then known except the moon. In 1931 it was scheduled to ap 723
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