WAAGE, PETER

(b. island of Hitterø [now Hidra], near Flekkefjord, Norway, 29 June 1833; d. Christiania [now Oslo], Norway, 13 January 1900), chemistry, mineralogy.

The son of Peter Pedersen Waage, a shipmaster and shipowner, and Regine Lovise Wattne, Waage was raised on the island of Hitterø, where his forebears had lived as seamen for hundreds of years. Since his father was usually at sea, he grew up mainly under the supervision of his mother, who was his first teacher. When his precocity became known (he was able to read at the age of about four), it was decided that rather than follow the traditional family occupation, he was to have further education.

Waage’s first regular schooling, at Flekkefjord, began when he was eleven. The school principal persuaded him to go to the University of Christiania, and to prepare for this he entered the fourth year of the Bergen Grammar School in 1849. He passed his matriculation examination cum laudabilis in 1854 and studied medicine during his first three years at the university. In 1857 he turned to mineralogy and chemistry. (As a boy, he had an extensive collection of minerals, plants, and insects, and some of his first publications dealt with mineralogy and crystallography.) In 1858 Waage was awarded the Crown Prince’s Gold Medal for “Udvikling af de surstofholdige syreradikalers theori,” which was published in 1859, the same year as his book Outline of Crystallography, written with H. Mohn.

In 1859, after graduation, Waage received a scholarship in chemistry that enabled him to make a year’s study tour in France and Germany, begining in the following spring. Most of his time was spent with Bunsen at Heidelberg. In 1861 Waage was appointed lecturer in chemistry, and in 1866 he was promoted to the only chair of chemistry then existing at the University of Christiania.

C. M. Guldberg and Waage, whose names are linked for their joint discovery of the law of mass action, were related through marriages to daughters of cabinet minister Hans Riddervold; Waage married Johanne Christiane Tandberg Riddervold, by whom he had five children. His wife died in 1869, and in 1870 he married one of Guldberg’s sisters, Mathilde Sofie Guldberg: they had six children.

Their collaboration on the studies of chemical affinity that led to the law of mass action began immediately after Guldberg’s return from abroad in 1862. The first report of their results, published in 1864 in Forhandlinger i Videnskabs-selskabet i Christiania, remained almost completely unknown to scientists, a fate also suffered by a more detailed description of their theory published in French in 1867. The theory did not become generally known until Ostwald, in a paper published in 1877, adopted the law of mass action and proved its validity by new experiments. In 1878 van’t Hoff, apparently without any knowledge of Guldberg and Waage’s work, derived the law from reaction kinetics. Although the law had several forerunners, the combined efforts of the theorist Guldberg and the empiricist Waage led to the first general mathematical and exact formulation of the role of the amounts of reactants in chemical equilibrium systems.

After completing his studies with Guldberg on the law of mass action, Waage increasingly concentrated on practical problems and on social and religious work, much of which dealt with nutrition and public health. For example, he discovered a method for preserving milk and developed a process for producing unsweetened condensed milk and sterilized canned milk. Waage also devoted considerable time to the industrial exploitation of the large quantities of fish caught along the Norwegian coast, developing a highly concentrated and excellent fish meal that was used on Norwegian ships and expeditions and was exported to Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In Waage’s time beer was taxed according to the amount of malt used in the brewing; he proposed, however, that taxation be based on alcoholic content and developed a method for determining the concentration of alcohol in beer by measurement of the boiling point.

Religious work with young people was a major interest of Waage’s. He was active in the founding and management of the Christiania Ynglingeforening (later the Oslo YMCA) and the Norwegian Christian Youth Association. He was co-editor of the Polyteknisk tidsskrift, an active member and officer of scientific societies, and the recipient of many honors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Guldberg and Waage’s papers on the law of mass action were abridged and translated into German by Richard Abegg as Untersuchungen über die chemischen Affinitäten, Ostwald’s Klassiker dar Exakten Wissenschaften no. 104 (Leipzig, 1899). Their first paper, “Studier over Affiniteten,” in Forhandlinger i Videnskabs-selskabet i Christiania, 7 (1864), 35–45, appears in facs., along with a number of articles on the law, in Haadon Haraldsen, ed., The Law of Mass Action: A Centenary volume 1864-1964 (Oslo, 1964), 7–17.

II. Secondary Literature. A biography of Waage and a discussion of his work by Haakon Haraldsen are in The Law of Mass Action, 26–32, 32–34; and in Untersuchungen…Affinitäten, 174–178. For a brief obituary see W. Ramsay, in Journal of the Chemical Society, 77 (1900), 591–592.

George B. Kauffman