Documents for "Chemistry: Biographies":

• Abel, Sir Frederick Augustus 1826-1902, English chemist, an authority on explosives. He was professor of chemistry at the Royal Military Academy (1851-55) and chemist to the War Dept. and government referee (1854-88). Among...

• Achard, Franz Karl 1753-1821, German chemist. He made pioneer use of the discovery by his countryman Andreas Marggraf of sugar in beetroots. The government granted him an estate in Silesia where, in 1806, he...

• Alder, Kurt 1902-58, German chemist, educated at Berlin and at Kiel. He was on the research staff of the Bayer Dye Works (1936-40) before becoming (1940) professor of chemistry and director of the chemical...

• Arrhenius, Svante August 1859-1927, Swedish chemist. He was a professor of physics in Stockholm in 1895 and became director of the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry, Stockholm, in 1905. For originating (1884, 1887)...

• Aston, Francis William 1877-1945, English physicist and chemist. He was affiliated with the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, from 1910. In 1922 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry mainly for his discovery of a...

• Baekeland, Leo Hendrik 1863-1944, American chemist, b. Belgium, grad. Univ. of Ghent, 1882. In 1889 he emigrated to the United States. He founded (1893) and conducted, until 1899, when he sold the rights to Eastman, a...

• Baeyer, Adolf von (Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer) , 1835-1917, German chemist. He taught at Berlin and Strasbourg and in 1875 succeeded Liebig at Munich. For his work in organic chemistry, especially that on organic dyes and the hydroaromatic...

• Barton, Derek H. R. 1918-98, British chemist, b. Gravesend, England, grad. Imperial College of Science and Technology (B.S. 1940, Ph.D. 1942, D.Sc. 1949). He was on the faculty of Imperial College (1945-50, 1957-78),...

• Berthelot, Pierre Eugène Marcelin 1827-1907, French chemist. He was professor at the École Supérieure de Pharmacie (1859) and at the Collège de France from 1865. In 1900 he became a member of the French Academy. A founder of...

• Berthollet, Claude Louis, Comte 1748-1822, French chemist. His contributions to chemistry include the analysis of ammonia and prussic acid and the discovery of the bleaching properties of chlorine. He collaborated with Antoine...

• Berzelius, Jöns Jakob, Baron 1779-1848, Swedish chemist, M.D. Univ. of Uppsala, 1802. He was noted for his work as teacher at the medical school and other institutions in Stockholm and for his discoveries in diverse fields of...

• Black, Joseph 1728-99, Scottish chemist and physician, b. France. He was professor of chemistry at Glasgow (1756-66) and from 1766 at Edinburgh. He is best known for his theories of latent heat and specific...

• Boisbaudran, Paul Émile Lecoq de 1838-1912, French discoverer of the elements gallium, samarium, and dysprosium. He also made contributions in the field of spectroscopy, including his experimentation with the rare-earth metals.

• Boltwood, Bertram Borden 1870-1927, American chemist and physicist, b. Amherst, Mass., grad. Sheffield Scientific School, Yale, 1892. After graduate study at Leipzig and Yale (Ph.D., 1897), he taught at Yale until his...

• Boussingault, Jean Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné 1802-87, French agricultural chemist. He was professor of chemistry at Lyons and later professor of agriculture and analytical chemistry at the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He is known...

• Boyle, Robert 1627-91, Anglo-Irish physicist and chemist. The seventh son of the 1st earl of Cork, he was educated at Eton and on the Continent and conducted most of his researches at his own laboratories at...

• Brown, Herbert Charles 1912-2004, American chemist, b. London, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1938. A professor at Wayne State Univ. (1943-47) and Purdue Univ. (1947-78), he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Georg Wittig. Brown developed boron-containing compounds as important reagents in organic synthesis. These organoborones provided an inexpensive means of making organic chemicals used in agricultural,...

• Buchner, Eduard 1860-1917, German chemist. He taught at Berlin, Breslau, and, from 1911, at Würzburg. He discovered (1896) that alcoholic fermentation of sugars is caused by yeast enzymes and not by the yeast...

• Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm 1811-99, German scientist, educated at the Univ. of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1830. He served on the faculties of several universities and was at Heidelberg from 1852 to 1889...

• Butlerov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich 1825-86, Russian chemist. As professor at the Univ. of Kazan he founded the first school of Russian chemists and directed research designed to confirm the classical theory of chemical structure,...

• Calvin, Melvin 1911-97, American organic chemist and educator, b. St. Paul, Minn., grad. Michigan College of Mining and Technology, 1931, Ph.D. Univ. of Minnesota, 1935. In 1937 he joined the faculty at the Univ...

• Cannizzaro, Stanislao 1826-1910, Italian chemist. From 1861 he was professor at Palermo and from 1871 at Rome, where he was also a member of the senate and of the council of public instruction. He is known for his...

• Carothers, Wallace Hume 1896-1937, American chemist, b. Burlington, Iowa. He received his doctorate at the Univ. of Illinois in 1924, then taught organic chemistry there and at Harvard. In 1928 he was made head of the...

• Caventou, Joseph Bienaimé 1795-1877, French chemist. He was professor at the École de Pharmacie, Paris. With P. J. Pelletier he isolated quinine (from cinchona bark), strychnine, and brucine and studied the green pigment...

• Chevreul, Michel Eugène 1786-1889, French chemist. He studied under L. N. Vauquelin, was director of the Gobelin tapestry works, and from 1830 was professor, and from 1860 to 1879 director, at the natural history museum...

• Coolidge, William David 1873-1975, American physical chemist, b. Hudson, Mass., grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1896. He joined the General Electric Company in 1905 and served as director of its research...

• Cornforth, Sir John Warcup 1917-, Australian chemist, Ph.D. Oxford Univ., 1941. Although Cornforth suffered a hearing loss from childhood, he was aided in communicating by his wife and co-researcher Rita Harradence. His...

• Cram, Donald James 1919-2001, American chemist, b. Chester, Vt., Ph.D. Harvard, 1947. A professor at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles, Cram expanded on the work of Charles J. Pedersen by synthesizing three-dimensional...

• Crookes, Sir William 1832-1919, English chemist and physicist. After serving at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, and teaching chemistry at Chester Training College, he retired to work in his own laboratory in London...

• Döbereiner, Johann Wolfgang 1780-1849, German chemist. From 1810 he was professor of the Univ. of Jena. He is known especially for his discovery of similar triads of elements, a step in the development of the periodic law. He...

• Dalton, John 1766-1844, English scientist. He revived the atomic theory (see atom ), which he formulated in the first volume of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (2 vol., 1808-27). He had already applied the concept to a table of atomic weights (1803), in a paper (1805) on the absorption of gases, and in developing his famous law of partial pressures, known...

• Davy, Sir Humphry 1778-1829, English chemist and physicist. The son of a woodcarver, he received his early education at Truro and was apprenticed (1795) to a surgeon-apothecary at Penzance. While director...

• Dewar, Sir James 1842-1923, British chemist and physicist, b. Scotland. He was professor of chemistry (from 1877) at the Royal Institution, London, and later was director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory...

• Draper, John William 1811-82, American scientist, philosopher, and historian, b. near Liverpool, England, M.D. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1836. In 1839 he became professor of chemistry at the Univ. of the City of New York...

• Dumas, Jean Baptiste André 1800-1884, French organic chemist. He was distinguished for his researches on atomic weights, esters, vapor densities, the oxidation products of alcohols, and the laws of substitution. He taught...

• Erlenmeyer, Richard A. C. E. 1825-1909, German chemist. He studied at Giessen under Justus von Liebig and at Heidelberg under Friedrich Kekulé, both German chemists. Erlenmeyer was professor of chemistry at the Munich...

• Fischer, Emil 1852-1919, German organic chemist. He is especially noted for his researches on the structure and synthesis of sugars and of purines and purine base derivatives, e.g., caffeine; for this work he...

• Fourcroy, Antoine François, comte de 1755-1809, French chemist. He was a pioneer in animal and plant chemistry and collaborated with Lavoisier and others in reforming the system of chemical nomenclature. He was professor from 1784 at...

• Frankland, Sir Edward 1825-99, English chemist. He studied under Bunsen and Liebig and taught at several English institutions. In working on the synthesis and isolation of compounds he evolved the theory of valence. He...

• Fukui, Kenichi 1918-98, Japanese chemist, b. Nara, Japan, Ph.D. Kyoto Univ., 1948. As a professor at Kyoto Univ., Fukui developed the theory that during chemical reactions molecules share loosely bonded...

• Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis 1778-1850, French chemist and physicist. He was professor in Paris at the Sorbonne, at the Polytechnic School, and at the Jardin des Plantes. Gay-Lussac made two balloon ascensions in 1804,...

• Geber see Jabir.

• Geoffroy the Elder see Geoffroy, Étienne François.

• Geoffroy, Étienne François 1672-1731, French physician and chemist, also known as Geoffroy the Elder. He became a pharmacist in 1694 and received an M.D. at Paris in 1704. He was professor of medicine at the Collège Royal...

• Gerhardt, Charles Frédéric 1816-56, French chemist, b. Strasbourg. He revived the theory of acid radicals, which he called the theory of residues, and did valuable research in organic chemistry, especially on the anhydrides...

• Giauque, William Francis 1895-1982, American chemist, b. Niagara Falls, Ont., Canada, grad. Univ. of California (B.S., 1920; Ph.D., 1922). A member of the faculty of the Univ. of California from 1922, he became professor...

• Glauber, Johann Rudolf 1604-70, German alchemist. A forerunner of scientific chemists, Glauber made many practical advances in analytical chemistry; he devised new procedures and was the first to prepare several...

• Graham, Thomas 1805-69, Scottish chemist, best known for research in diffusion in both gases and liquids that led to his formulation of Graham's law. His discovery that certain substances (e.g., glue, gelatin, starch) pass through a membrane more slowly than others (inorganic...

• Grignard, Victor 1871-1935, French chemist. He shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in organic synthesis based on his discovery (1900) of the Grignard reagent. He taught at the Univ. of Nancy (1909-19)...

• Guyton de Morveau, Louis Bernard, Baron 1737-1816, French chemist and lawyer. He wrote the chemical section of the Encyclopédie méthodique (Vol. I, 1786) and collaborated with Lavoisier and others in establishing a system of chemical nomenclature. He taught chemistry (1794-1811) at the École Polytechnique, Paris, served in the...

• Haber, Fritz 1868-1934, German chemist. He was a professor of physical chemistry at Karlsruhe and became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Dahlem in 1911. During World War I he directed Germany's...

• Hahn, Otto 1879-1968, German chemist and physicist. His important contributions in the field of radioactivity include the discovery of several radioactive substances, the development of methods of separating...

• Hare, Robert 1781-1858, American chemist, b. Philadelphia. He was professor of chemistry (1819-47) at the medical college of the Univ. of Pennsylvania. Hare made important contributions to early American...

• Hassel, Odd 1897-1981, Norwegian chemist, b. Christiania (now Oslo), grad. Oslo Univ. (1920), Ph.D. Univ. of Berlin (1924). After pursuing X-ray crystallographic studies in Germany, in 1925 he joined the...

• Hauptman, Herbert Aaron 1917-, American chemist, b. New York City, grad. City College of New York (B.S., 1937) and Univ. of Maryland (Ph.D., 1955). In 1985, Hauptman and former undergraduate classmate Jerome Karle were awarded...

• Helmont, Jan Baptista van 1577-1644, Flemish physician, chemist, and physicist. He attributed physiological changes to chemical causes, but his conclusions were colored by his speculative mysticism. He discovered carbon...

• Herschbach, Dudley Robert 1932-, American chemist, b. San Jose, Calif., Ph.D. Harvard, 1958. In 1986, Herschbach shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi for helping to apply the technology...

• Hevesy, Georg von 1885-1966, Hungarian physicist and chemist. He received the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in studying chemical processes. Hevesy was the first to...

• Higgins, William b. 1762 or 1763, d. 1825, Irish chemist. After study at Oxford he became supervisor of the Royal Dublin Society's mineralogical collection and in 1800 the Society's professor of chemistry. He...

• Hoffmann, Roald 1937-, American chemist, b. Złoczów, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), Ph.D. Harvard, 1962. After receiving his degree and working with Robert Woodward at Harvard (1962-65), he became (1965) a...

• Hofmann, August Wilhelm von 1818-92, German organic chemist. He was professor at the Univ. of Berlin from 1865 and was a founder (1868) of the German Chemical Society. He studied the constitution of aniline and was the first...

• Huber, Robert 1937-, German biochemist. After receiving his doctorate at Munich Technical Univ., he worked both there and at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. With Hartmut Michel and Johann Deisenhofer...

• Jabir or Geber , fl. 8th cent., Arab alchemist and physician, originally named Jabir ibn Hayyan. He is believed to have lived at Kufa and at Baghdad. A great number of works on alchemy, many of them unpublished,...

• Kekulé von Stradonitz, Friedrich August 1829-96, German organic chemist. He was professor at Ghent (1858-65) and at Bonn from 1865. He made studies of various carbon compounds, especially benzene , for the molecular structure of which he...

• Klaproth, Martin Heinrich 1743-1817, German chemist. He is often referred to as the father of analytic chemistry. He recognized (1789) the presence of zirconium in the ore zirconia and of uranium in a precipitate of...

• Kopp, Hermann Franz Moritz 1817-92, German physical chemist and historian of chemistry. His research concerned the connection between the physical properties and the chemical structure of compounds. He continued Jöns...

• Kuhn, Richard 1900-1967, Austrian chemist, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Heidelberg. For his research on the carotinoids (he prepared eight of them in pure form) and on vitamins (he isolated...

• Lémery, Nicolas 1645-1715, French chemist. He was a pharmacist and lecturer in Paris and was the author of a standard textbook in chemistry (1675) and of a treatise on antimony (1707).

• Langmuir, Irving 1881-1957, American chemist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Associated (1909-50) with the research laboratory of the General Electric Company, he introduced atomic-hydrogen welding, invented a gas-filled...

• Laurent, Auguste 1808-53, French organic chemist. He devised a systematic nomenclature for organic chemistry. His studies on naphthalene and its chlorination products led him to propose a nucleus theory that...

• Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent 1743-94, French chemist and physicist, a founder of modern chemistry. He studied under eminent men of his day, won early recognition, and was admitted to the Academy of Sciences in 1768. Much of...

• Le Bel, Joseph Achille 1847-1930, French chemist. He was educated at the École polytechnique and carried out much of his research in his own private laboratory. He theorized (1874) that optical activity—the presence of...

• Le Châtelier, Henri Louis 1850-1936, French industrial chemist. He made many contributions to industrial chemistry, but is best known for his work on the structure of alloys and for his enunciation of Le Châtelier's principle. This fundamental contribution to chemical thermodynamics had been anticipated in part by J. W. Gibbs, whose work Le Châtelier helped to spread in France. Toward the end of his life he wrote on...

• Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Paul Émile see Boisbaudran.

• Lee, Yuan Tseh 1936-, Taiwanese-American chemist, Ph.D. Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1965. In 1986, Lee shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Dudley R. Herschbach and John C. Polanyi for helping to apply...

• Lewis, Gilbert Newton 1875-1946, American chemist, b. Weymouth, Mass., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1896; Ph.D., 1899). He taught at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1907-12) and from 1912 was professor...

• Libby, Willard Frank 1908-80, American chemist, b. Grand Valley, Colo., grad. Univ. of California (B.S., 1931; Ph.D., 1933). He taught (1933-45) at the Univ. of California and was a chemist (1941-45) in the war...

• Liebig, Justus, Baron von 1803-73, German chemist. As professor at Giessen (1824-52), he was among the first to establish a chemical teaching laboratory; there some of the leading chemists of the 19th cent. were trained...

• Lipscomb, William Nunn 1919-, American physical chemist, b. Cleveland, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1946. A professor of chemistry at the Univ. of Minnesota and later at Harvard, his use of X-ray techniques...

• Macintosh, Charles 1766-1843, Scottish chemist and inventor. In 1823 he developed a waterproof fabric used to make raincoats that were named for him. His other research included preparing sugar of lead and inventing...

• Marcus, Rudolph 1923-, American chemist, b. Montreal, Canada. A professor at the California Institute of Technology, he was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a theory of electron transfer...

• Marggraf, Andreas Sigismund 1709-82, German chemist, a pioneer in analytical chemistry. He proved that alumina, magnesia, and lime are distinct earths, found (1743) an improved method for the commercial preparation of...

• Martin, Archer John Porter 1910-2002, English biochemist, educated at Cambridge Univ. From 1938 to 1946 he carried on chemical research in the laboratories of the Wool Industries Association at Leeds, Yorkshire. In 1948 he...

• Mendeleev, Dmitri Ivanovich 1834-1907, Russian chemist. He is famous for his formulation (1869) of the periodic law and the invention of the periodic table , a classification of the elements; with Lothar Meyer , who had independently reached similar conclusions, he was awarded the Davy medal in 1882. From his remarkable table Mendeleev predicted the properties of elements then unknown; three of these...

• Meyer, Julius Lothar 1830-95, German chemist. He taught at Breslau, Karlsruhe, and Tübingen (from 1876) and is known especially for his work in the development of the periodic law , for which, with Mendeleev, he received the Davy medal in 1882. He evolved the atomic volume curve (1869), which represented graphically the relation between the atomic weights and the atomic...

• Mitscherlich, Eilhard 1794-1863, German chemist. He was professor at Berlin from 1822. Noted for his discovery of the principle of isomorphism , he did important work also on the compounds of phosphorus and arsenic and...

• Mond, Ludwig 1839-1909, chemist; father of Alfred Moritz Mond. He was born in Germany and became a naturalized British subject. Mond experimented with alkalies and also developed a producer gas known by his...

• Morley, Edward Williams 1838-1923, American scientist, b. Newark, N.J., grad. Williams College, 1860. From 1869 to 1906 he was professor of chemistry at Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve Univ.). He is...

• Nernst, Walther Hermann 1864-1941, German physicist and chemist, a founder of modern physical chemistry. After doing outstanding research on osmotic pressure and electrochemistry, he turned to thermodynamics , establishing in 1906 a new tenet (often called the third law of thermodynamics) that dealt with the behavior of matter at temperatures approaching absolute zero. For his work in thermodynamics he...

• Newlands, John Alexander Reina 1838-98, British chemist. He studied at the Royal College of Chemistry in London and worked as an industrial chemist. Newlands prepared the first periodic table of elements arranged in the order of...

• Niepce, Joseph Nicéphore 1765-1833, French chemist who originated a process of photography (see photography, still ). In 1826 he produced the first known photograph, which he called a heliograph, using bitumen of Judea (a...

• Nobel, Alfred Bernhard 1833-96, Swedish chemist and inventor. Educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, he traveled as a youth and returned to St. Petersburg in 1852 to assist his father in the development of torpedoes and...

• Ostwald, Wilhelm 1853-1932, German physical chemist and natural philosopher, b. Riga, Latvia. He was professor of chemistry and director of the chemical laboratory (1886-1906) at the Univ. of Leipzig. He received...

• Paneth, Friedrich Adolf 1887-1958, Austrian chemist. He was educated at Vienna, Munich, and Glasgow. He held a number of teaching posts in Germany until he was forced into exile in England in 1933. After World War II he...

• Pasteur, Louis 1822-95, French chemist. He taught at Dijon, Strasbourg, and Lille, and in Paris at the École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne (1867-89). His early research consisted of chemical studies of the...

• Pauling, Linus Carl 1901-94, American chemist, b. Portland, Oreg. He was one of the few recipients of two Nobel Prizes, winning the chemistry award in 1954 and the peace prize in 1962. His scientific career centered...

• Pelletier, Pierre Joseph 1788-1842, French chemist. With J. B. Caventou , he was cofounder of alkaloid chemistry and codiscoverer of quinine, strychnine, brucine, and other alkaloids. He also isolated such other substances as picrotoxin, caffeine, and piperine. He was...

• Perkin, Sir William Henry 1838-1907, English chemist. In 1856 he discovered the first aniline dye (aniline purple, known as mauve and mauveine); by founding a factory to make it, Perkin established the aniline dye industry...

• Polanyi, John Charles 1929-, Canadian chemist. Raised and educated in England, he worked as a researcher in Canada before taking a teaching position at the Univ. of Toronto in 1956. He used spectroscopy as a means to...

• Pople, Sir John Anthony 1925-2004, British computational chemist. Trained as a mathematician at Cambridge (B.A. 1946, Ph.D. 1951), he worked at Cambridge (1951-58) and England's National Physical Laboratory (1958-64)...

• Porter, George, Baron Porter of Luddenham 1920-2002, British chemist, b. Stainforth, England, grad. Leeds Univ., Ph.D. Cambridge, 1949. After serving as a radar officer during World War II, he did postgraduate research with R. G. W...

• Pregl, Fritz 1869-1930, Austrian physiologist and chemist, M.D. Univ. of Graz, 1894. He taught at the universities of Innsbruck (1910-13) and Graz (from 1913). For his methods of quantitative organic...

• Prelog, Vladimir 1906-98, Swiss chemist, b. Sarejevo, Austria-Hungary (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Educated in Prague, he worked in Yugoslavia until the German invasion in 1941, when he moved to Switzerland to...

• Priestley, Joseph 1733-1804, English theologian and scientist. He prepared for the Presbyterian ministry and served several churches in England as pastor but gradually rejected orthodox Calvinism and adopted...

• Prigogine, Ilya 1917-2003, Belgian chemist, b. Moscow. He was raised and educated in Belgium, receiving his doctorate in 1941 and joining the faculty of the Free Univ. of Brussels in 1947. In 1959 he became...

• Proust, Joseph Louis 1754-1826, French chemist. He was professor of chemistry at the artillery school in Segovia, Spain, and director of the laboratory of Charles IV at Madrid from 1789. He returned to France c.1806...

• Prout, William 1785-1850, English chemist and physician. Prout's hypothesis, advanced in 1815-16, suggested that atomic weights of elements are multiples of that of hydrogen and that elements are formed by a...

• Ramsay, Sir William 1852-1916, Scottish chemist. He was professor of chemistry at University College, Bristol (1880-87), and at University College, London (1887-1912). In his early experiments he showed that the...

• Regnault, Henri Victor 1810-78, French physicist and chemist. He was professor of chemistry at the École polytechnique, Paris, from 1840 and at the Collège de France from 1841; he became chief engineer of mines (1847)...

• Roscoe, Sir Henry Enfield 1833-1915, English chemist. He was professor (1857-87) at Owens College, Manchester. He is known for his work, with R. W. Bunsen, in photochemistry and for his study and analysis of vanadium...

• Sörensen, Sören Peter Lauritz 1868-1939, Danish biochemist. In 1899 he received a Ph.D. degree in Copenhagen. Sörensen was director of chemistry at Carlsberg Laboratory and worked as a professor in Copenhagen. His work on...

• Sanger, Frederick 1918-, British biochemist, grad. Cambridge Univ. (B.A., 1939; Ph.D., 1943). He continued his research at Cambridge after 1943. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies on insulin,...

• Scheele, Karl Wilhelm 1742-86, Swedish chemist, b. Stralsund. He is known as the discoverer of many chemical substances. He was a pharmacist in Stockholm, in Uppsala (1770-75), and then in Köping. He prepared and...

• Schwarz, Berthold fl. 14th cent., German Franciscan monk and alchemist. It was formerly widely believed, especially in Germany, that he invented gunpowder and was the first to construct bronze cannon. It is now...

• Silliman, Benjamin 1779-1864, American chemist, geologist, and physicist, b. Trumbull, Conn., grad. Yale, 1796. In 1802 he was appointed first professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale; he traveled abroad...

• Soddy, Frederick 1877-1956, English chemist. He worked under Lord Rutherford at McGill Univ. and with Sir William Ramsay at the Univ. of London. After serving (1910-14) as lecturer in physical chemistry and...

• Solvay, Ernest 1838-1922, Belgian industrial chemist and philanthropist. He originated the Solvay process and established (1863) near Charleroi, Belgium, the first plant for making soda by this process; later, plants were set up in many countries. He founded at Brussels the Solvay institutes of...

• Stahl, Georg Ernst 1660-1734, German physician and chemist. He taught (1694-1716) at the Univ. of Halle, then went to Berlin as court physician. He is known for his promotion of the phlogiston theory of combustion...

• Stas, Jean Servais 1813-91, Belgian chemist. He was assistant to J. B. A. Dumas and professor (1840-65) at the École royale militaire, Brussels. He is noted for his accurate determinations of atomic weights.

• Svedberg, Theodor 1884-1971, Swedish chemist. He was professor of physical chemistry from 1912 to 1949 at the Univ. of Uppsala. For his fundamental research on colloid chemistry he received the 1926 Nobel Prize in...

• Takamine, Jokichi 1854-1922, Japanese chemist. He served (1881-84) as chemist in the employ of the Japanese government and (1887) organized a fertilizer manufacturing company. In 1890 he settled in the United...

• Taube, Henry 1915-, American inorganic chemist, b. Saskatchewan, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley, became a professor of chemistry at Univ. of Chicago (1952), and then moved to Stanford Univ. in 1962. He...

• Tennant, Smithson 1761-1815, English chemist. In 1796 he proved, by burning a diamond, that the diamond consists solely of carbon. In 1804 he announced his discovery of osmium and iridium.

• Thénard, Louis Jacques 1777-1857, French chemist. He became professor at the Collège de France (1802), dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Paris (1821), chancellor of the Univ. of Paris (1832), and was made a baron in...

• Tiselius, Arne 1902-71, Swedish biochemist. He received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing new methods of separating and detecting colloids. One system (electro-phoresis) employs an electrical...

• Tizard, Sir Henry Thomas 1885-1959, English physical chemist and scientific adviser. He was educated at Westminster school and Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he received honors in natural science in 1908. During the...

• Urey, Harold Clayton 1893-1981, American chemist, b. Walkerton, Ind., grad. Univ. of Montana (B.S., 1917), Ph.D. Univ. of California, 1923. He taught at Johns Hopkins (1924-29), at Columbia (1929-45; as head of the...

• van't Hoff, Jacobus Hendricus 1852-1911, Dutch physical chemist. He taught at the universities of Amsterdam (1878-96) and Berlin (from 1896). For his work in chemical dynamics and osmotic electrical conductivity (which led to...

• Wöhler, Friedrich 1800-1882, German chemist. He studied under the German chemist Leopold Gmelin and J. J. Berzelius, a Swedish chemist, and in 1836 was appointed professor at the Univ. of Göttingen. He devised...

• Welsbach, Carl Auer, Baron von 1858-1929, Austrian chemist. He discovered the rare earth elements neodymium and praseodymium (1885) and lutetium (c.1908, independently of the French chemist Georges Urbain). He is known also for...

• Wilkinson, Sir Geofferey 1921-, English inorganic chemist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ernst Otto Fischer for their independent research on the organometallic compounds of the transitions metals. At...

• Willstätter, Richard 1872-1942, German chemist. He was professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry, Berlin (1912-16), and at the Univ. of Munich (1916-25). He received the 1915 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for...

• Windaus, Adolf 1876-1959, German chemist. He was professor of chemistry and director of the chemistry laboratories at the Univ. of Göttingen (1915-44). For his research on sterols, especially in relation to...

• Wollaston, William Hyde 1766-1828, English scientist, M.D. Cambridge, 1793. His wide-ranging scientific achievements include the discovery (1802) of the dark lines (Fraunhofer lines) in the solar spectrum; invention of...

• Woodward, Robert Burns 1917-80, American chemist and educator, b. Boston, grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B., 1936; Ph.D., 1937). He taught at Harvard from 1938, becoming Donner professor of science there...

• Wurtz, Charles Adolphe 1817-84, French chemist. He was professor at the Sorbonne (1852-75), at the Faculty of Medicine, Paris (1853-75), and at the Faculty of Sciences, Paris (from 1875). Noted for his research in...

• Ziegler, Karl 1898-1973, German chemist. Educated at the Univ. of Marburg, he taught at Heidelberg and Halle and for a short period at the Univ. of Chicago. He became director of the Max Planck Institute for...