WALD, FRANTIšEK

(b. Brandýsek, near Slaný, Czechoslovakia, 9 January 1861; d. Vítkovice [now part of Ostrava], Czechoslovakia, 19 October 1930), chemistry.

Wald’s father came from Chemnitz (now Karl-Marx-Stadt, D.D.R.) and became foreman in the workshops of the Austrian State Railways at Slaný. His mother was a native German from the Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) district. Although of German origin. Wald adopted Czech nationality. He attended a Czech municipal school at Kladno, a center of the iron industry, to which his parents moved after the Austro-Prussian War (1866). The thorough grounding in elementary mathematics that he received prepared him well for his essentially nonclassical secondary education at a Czech school in Prague. When he obtained a grant from the Austrian State Railways, Wald was obliged to leave the Czech school and attend its German counterpart. After finishing school he studied chemistry at the German technical university in Prague until 1882 without formally taking a degree, because it was not required for appointment as a technician in industry.

Wald joined the laboratory of Pražská železářská společnost, a leading ironworks at Kladno, and in 1886 he was appointed chief chemist. Although a gifted analytical—he devised ingenious gasometric and other methods of making mining and metallurgical practice more scientific—he gradually came to devote himself to an examination of the theoretical basis of chemistry. Several efforts to procure Wald an appointment to a professorship by, among others, Ostwald and Mach, were unsuccessful. Finally the chair of theoretical and physical chemistry and metallurgy at the Czech Technical University in Prague was offered to him (1908), and he held it until his retirement twenty years later. During his tenure Wald was twice elected dean of the Faculty of Chemical Technology and was rector of the university (1920-1921).

Dissatisfied with the atomic-molecular interpretation of chemical phenomena, Wald initially turned his attention to the first two laws of thermodynamics. Summarizing his views in Die Energie und ihre Entwertung (Leipzig, 1888), he argued that it was an error to elaborate the second law of thermodynamics on the assumption that processes encountered in nature were reversible when actually they were not. For Wald the second law of thermodynamics was based on experience (Erfahrungsgesetz) and could be deduced logically, without the aid of mathematics. As for the first law, he believed in the quantitative principle of the conservation of energy but questioned the qualitative equivalence between work and heat. The amount of heat into which a certain amount of work was transformed was not really equipment to the original amount of work, since it did not possess the same quality or effectiveness (Wirkungsfähigkeit). Energy did not disappear, but degenerated; and Wald accepted the inference that heat that could not be usefully transformed into work or other forms of energy was accumulating in the universe. He supposed, however, that the state of uniform temperature or “heat death” to which the universe was tending would be reached only in infinite time.

Wald disapproved of the accepted theoretical basis of chemistry, on the ground that it was too hypothetical. He believed that natural compounds had rather a varying composition. Apparently never conceding the general validity of atomic considerations for chemical theory. Wald attempted to work out a system in which the atom was replaced by the more tangible “phase” as the fundamental concept. He treated the subject extensively in his second book, Chemie fází (Prague, 1918). Wald’s efforts to establish a general chemical theory on the basis of the phase concept clearly had some relation to his familiarity with problems of phase equilibrium in metallurgical practice. The Russian chemist N. S. Kurnakov, who was thinking along similar lines, valued Wald’s work very highly. Wald was deeply impressed by the predictive and controlling faculty of scientific chemistry, which made the chemist as powerful as nature.

Unlike many contemporary scientists, Wald thought that philosophy could not be kept out of science and criticized theoretical chemistry because of its philosophical shallowness. As a convinced idealist he rejected the mechanist interpretation of natural phenomena but, interestingly, admitted both free will and necessity. He recognized the existence of both and did not feel compelled to choose either one or the other. In an article on the theory of chemical operations, written only a year before his death, he proclaimed that this choice, imposed upon man, was unnecessary because each—natural law and human will—had its domain of influence, with conscious practical activity as the mediator. Although it was an insoluble puzzle to many, Wald had no difficulty in reconciling the two seemingly exclusive conceptions and in perceiving the link between them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A list of Wald’s publications, compiled by A. Simek, in Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications, 3 (1931), 3–8, does not include Wald’s notices and popular articles on scientific and technical topics. “The Foundations of a Theory of Chemical Operations” appeared in Czech in Přírodovědechý sborník, 6 (1929); an English trans, appeared in Collection (see above), 32–48, and a condensed version in G. Druce. Two Czech Chemists, 57–61 (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Originally planned as a Festschrift in honor of Wald’s seventieth birthday, Collection (see above) contains articles by J. Baborovský on Wald’s life (in English), by A. Križ on Wald’s theory of phases and of chemical stoichiometry (in English), and by Q. Quadrát on Wald’s contribution to analytical chemistry (in French). These articles served as the main source of information for G. Druce, Two Czech Chemists: Bohuslav Brauner (1855-1935) František Wald (1861-1930) (London, 1944). M. Teich discusses Wald’s place in the history of chemical thought and practice in Bohemia in Dějiny exaktních věd v českých zemích, L. Nový ed. (prague, 1961), 334–335, 347–351 (in Czech, with Russian and English summaries). See also M. Teich, “Der Energetismus bei Wilhelm Ostwald and František Wald,” in Naturwissenschaft, Tradition, Fortschritt–Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, supp. (1963), 147–153. Although neglected it is not quite correct that Wald’s work has been almost completely ignored, as Joachim Thiele maintains in “Franz Walds Kritik der theoretischen Chemie (nach Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1902-1906 und unveröffentlichten Briefen),” in Annals of Science, 30 (1973), 417–433.

M. Teich