Saturday, April 27, 2013

Alexander Borodin: Chemist Composer

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
The topic of this post is at the suggestion of Melissa. Thanks for commenting! I enjoyed researching Borodin.

Alexander Borodin was a Russian composer and chemist. Those two seem to be very divergent, and in reading about him, it is interesting that I can find very little about if the two fields interacted in any practical way. In fact, his science appears to have gotten in the way of his composing. I had never heard of him, or at least thought I hadn't. It turns out I have heard some of his music. Here is an example, the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor. I would suggest starting this and listening while continuing to read, though the ballet is quite good too.





Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, but he was born in Saint Petersburg and registered as the son of a serf. The prince did not forget him, though, and he was able to receive a good education. He was interested in both science and music, and wrote his first existing composition, a polka, at the age of 9. He attended the Medico-Surgical Military Academy in Saint Petersburg and started out as a doctor, though he became very interested in chemistry and studied with the chemist Nikolay Zinin, who apparently was a Russian chemist of note. Despite being at a medical school, Borodin was squeamish and therefore not well suited to being a doctor, so he continued his chemistry studies. Zinin is said (probably apocryphally) to have told him
Mr. Borodin, it would be better if you gave less thought to writing songs. I have placed all my hopes in you, and want you to be my successor one day. You waste too much time thinking about music. A man cannot serve two masters." (Podlech, from another source)
 Borodin did not give up "writing songs", but still managed to become Zinin's successor. After graduating in 1858, he traveled Europe for three years. He started in Heidelberg, working first with Robert Bunsen, though he ended up staying longer with Emil Erlenmeyer (and I've already written about them!). There he became friends with Dmitri Mendeleev (of the periodic table) and his future wife, the pianist Yekaterina Protopopova. He also attended the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860, an important milestone in understanding and standardizing atomic weights. He went with Yekaterina to Pisa and asked to work in the laboratory of de Luca and Tassinari (whom I had never heard of ). They had platinum retorts, which enabled him to work with corrosive substances. There he was able to make the first nucleophilic replacement of a halogen with fluorine, which was difficult because of the strength of fluorine bonds and fluorine's toxicity.

http://a2.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/124/2fe162eddc9e4dd18038c7c64500805d/l.jpg
The Five. From left to right: singer, Mussorgsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Vladimir Stasov, Balakirev, Cui, and Borodin
Upon his return to Saint Petersburg, he became a professor, and also a member of The Five. The Five was a group of Russian composers in Saint Petersburg who were self-trained amateurs but wanted to write music that was authentically Russian. The other composers in this group were Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, and César Cui. Not a shabby bunch to be hanging out with!

Borodin continued his research and composing. One of the interesting things that happened in the next decade was a sort of dispute with August Kekulé. Borodin had been studying aldehydes, but Kekulé began research into their condensation in the late 1860s. It seems rather confusing who did what, but Borodin seemed to think that Kekulé was impinging on his territory. However, Borodin wasn't publishing much, so it was hard to actually make a claim. Eventually, Borodin ceded and returned to his work on amides. One of his most significant contributions in this field was a simple device to measure the amount of urea in animal urine. I have no idea why people wanted to use that, but contemporaries seemed pretty excited. After 1875, he did not publish any full papers. Instead, he spent more time on training students and advocating for women's rights. He gave lectures and provided special instruction for the female students studying medicine.

One wonders how Borodin juggled composing with science, and I found a great quote that expresses his difficulties.
In winter I can only write music when I am so ill that I don't give lectures, don't go to the laboratory, yet all the same can work a little. For this reason my musical friends, contrary to universal custom, always wish me not health, but sickness. (Letter to Liubov' Ivanova Karmalina, June 1, 1876)
Though his total oeuvre is small, the quality of his work is generally acknowledged to be good. He wrote two symphonies, some chamber music compositions, songs, and much of an opera. He worked on Prince Igor from 1869 until his death in 1887. Rimsky-Korsakov was concerned about it getting finished, and offered to help with it as much as he could. In the end, though, Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov had to finish it after Borodin's death, which unfortunately occurred at a fancy dress party.


References
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Friday, November 23, 2012

The Bunsen Burner, Spectroscopy, and Geysers

Robert Bunsen (1811-1899)
Robert Bunsen deserves to be remembered for more than his "invention" of the Bunsen burner.  He was a brilliant chemist, and did work in spectroscopy, blast furnaces, batteries, and even geology.  One of the things that I like about writing this blog is seeing just how many pies these scientists managed to get their fingers in. They were curious, and made discoveries that, even if tangential to their regular work, are in many cases still remembered.  See my last post on Bohr for one example.  Probably Bunsen's most notable research out of the field of chemistry was his foray into geysers.  In the 1840s, on a trip to Iceland to study the recently erupted volcano Mount Hekla.  But he also became curious about the geyser there and did some measurements.  He came up with a theory about how geysers work, and did a demonstration with a model geyser to show that his theory worked.  That would have been a fun demonstration to see!

His early research was in organic chemistry, and he studied arsenic compounds and arsenic poisoning. He showed that iron oxide hydrate could be used as an antidote for arsenic poisoning, and also did extensive research into cacodyl compounds.  While still a young chemist, he nearly died of arsenic poisoning and lost the use of one eye from an explosion of one of his arsenic-containing compounds.  I have not found anyone to say why he discontinued his studies of cacodyl compounds, but I think it may have had to do with their obviously dangerous effects.  The results of his work helped Edward Frankland and Friedrich Kekulé in their studies of chemical valency. Bunsen also studied blast furnaces, which were of great importance in the 1830s due to the huge amounts of iron being produced.  He showed that over half of the fuel was lost, and worked with Lyon Playfair to improve the furnaces to be more efficient and to catch potentially useful byproducts.  This work resulted in his only book, Gasometry: Comprising the Leading Physical and Chemical Properties of Gases.

When Robert Bunsen became a professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1852, he took charge of a new laboratory building.  The building was equipped with gas, and during construction, Bunsen made suggestions to the building's mechanic, Peter Desaga, regarding the burners to be used.  There had been previous burners used, including one by Michael Faraday, but his was an improvement on these and enabled the flame to be hot, sootless, and non-luminous.  A biographer wrote at his death that "The Bunsen burner is now in use everywhere from the kitchen to the research laboratory." (Crew, p. 302) Not sure how it was used in the kitchen, but there you have it.

Bunsen and Kirchhoff's spectrometer
Though I could also write about his carbon-zinc battery that was much cheaper to make and longer lasting than the previous platinum covered plates, or his invention of the ice-calorimeter and the vapor calorimeter, I do want to talk about his spectroscopic work, which is perhaps most important, and led to the discovery of two new elements.  Bunsen's work with spectroscopy was done in collaboration with Gustav Kirchhoff (Kirchhoff's Law, anyone?), whom he met in 1851.  He had already been interested in light, such as the improvement of the gas burner and showing that an electric current could create light.  Kirchhoff joined Bunsen at Heidelberg and they formed, so it seems, a great team.  Bunsen's work with electrochemistry and batteries gave him the ability to separate metals, and the non-luminous burner that he had improved meant that he could use flame tests to see the different colors that metals gave off.  Kirchhoff suggested that the colors of different metals that had similar colors might be able to be distinguished by looking at the spectra with a prism.  They found that these spectra were unique to different elements.  When they noted a new spectral blue line, Bunsen hypothesized that it was a new element and went on to distill 40 tonnes of water to isolate 50 grams of a chloro-platinic coumpound, from which he identified this new element, which he called cesium, Latin for deep blue, from the blue line in its spectrum.  In 1861 he announced the discovery of rubidium, and thereafter others used his spectroscopic methods to discover and isolate thallium, indium, germanium, gallium, and scandium.

If you are not familiar with the principle of a flame test, or even if you are because it is always cool, the following video is a nice demonstration of the different colors that different metals are, and shows the spectral lines too.


I will conclude with a sad reminder to back up your data. Bunsen also studied the spectra of rare earth metals, and had just finished a large manuscript on the subject.  He left the manuscript on a table near a glass of water, and when he came back, he found the manuscript burnt.  It took him two years to replicate the data and apparatuses.  So the equivalent of hard drive crashes are nothing new.

Works by Bunsen
References


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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Bohr's Dueling Discovery

Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Unfortunately this summer I wasn't able to finish as many posts as I had hoped, so rather than a full post today, here is a tidbit.  As per the latest poll, up this week is Niels Bohr! But there is a lot to talk about, particularly with respect to the atom, so instead, I'll talk about something you probably didn't know. One of Niels Bohr's contribution to science derived from his love of western films. He noted that the bad guys always drew first, but the good guys always won, and wondered if it was actually the case that the person who drew second won more often. He went out and purchased some cap guns and "dueled" his friends to find out. Sure enough, always drawing second, he won. Recently, proving that Bohr didn't just have faster reflexes than his friends, Andrew Welchman at the University of Birmingham confirmed that the second person to draw is milliseconds faster to the trigger. So stick to your hobbies!  You never know where they may lead.

References
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Friday, August 10, 2012

John Dalton: Atoms, Weather, and Vision

John Dalton
1766-1844
Since one of my undergraduate degrees was in chemistry, I cannot believe that to this point I have only written one post that warranted the tag of "chemists." So this post is an attempt to remedy this. In looking at the lists of names that I have as potential subjects for blog posts, the first that jumped out at me were Henderson and Hasselbalch, famous for the equation for determining the pH of a buffer solution.  But I try to mix up the time periods that I write about, which either means that you, my readers, do not get bored or that you get horribly confused.  If it is the latter, I apologize.  I would have guessed that the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation was developed in the nineteenth century, but it ws actually in the 20th century, which eliminates them from consideration at the present time.  So instead, I have decided to write on John Dalton, of Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, which you may (or may not) remember from high school chemistry. Dalton is also well known for his work in developing modern atomic theory.  Whether or not you know much about either of these topics, it is easy enough to find information on his contributions in these areas.  So I would like to focus in this post on two areas that receive less attention, his meteorological observations and studies on color blindness.

Dalton's System of Chemical Philosophy
Dalton's atomic and
molecular symbolism, from
A New System of Chemical Philosophy
Dalton’s interest in meteorology began while he was at school in Kendal, where he made the acquaintance of John Gough, who was nine years his senior.  It was he who first suggested that Dalton keep a meteorological journal.  Dalton made observations throughout his long life, including a measurement made the day before his death.  His first book of observations, Meteorological Observations and Essays, was published in 1793, with a second edition little changed from the first appearing in 1834.  While some of the book is simply his observations, he also included descriptions of many of the techniques used in making observations of the weather in use at the time.  He noted in the preface that “as the number of [barometers and thermometers] is increasing daily, many of them must fall into hands that are much unacquainted with their principles.”  In addition to writing about barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, thunderstorms, snows, winds, and the Aurorae Boreales, he also included essays regarding these phenomenon, particularly Aurora Borealis and its connection with magnetism.  It was his study of the atmosphere, a gas, that probably led to his interest in gases in general, which finally led him to his theories of atomic structure.  He also attempted to come up with the structures of many molecules, but was not always right since he didn’t know how much each atom actually weighed.  For instance, he thought that water was HO (one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom) rather than H2O.

John Dalton also put much thought into color blindness, a condition that he suffered from. He gave a lecture at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, of which he was a member, in 1794, describing the inconsistencies that he observed between how he saw color and how those around him saw colors.  He wrote to a friend that “the flowers of most of the Cranesbills appear to me in the day almost exactly sky blue, whilst others call them deep pink.” (The Worthies of Cumberland: John Dalton, p. 101) He also noted that his brother and he agreed on the colors of things, which to modern ears suggests that it was genetic color blindness.  Dalton suggested that the cause of the difference between  his vision and others was that the fluid in his eye was tinted blue.  As a true scientist, he suggested that his eyes should be dissected after his death to see if this was true.  It was not, but the eyes were preserved by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and recently the DNA was examined, showing that Dalton lacked one of the three photopigments in the eye.  (If you wish to see the present state of his eyes and related images, I suggest you go to http://www.sciencephoto.com/set/803.) This theory of photopigments had been proposed by Thomas Young (1773-1829), one of Dalton’s contemporaries who established the wave theory of light, but even though Young’s view was more correct, color blindness has been historically called Daltonism. This just goes to show that you don’t have to be right to be remembered, you just have to be the first, or perhaps the clearest.

Selected Works by Dalton
References and further reading
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Sunday, July 15, 2012

Hans Geiger and the Geiger-Müller Counter

Hans Geiger (1882 - 1945)
The first SciHistory poll is responsible for the subject of this latest post, Hans Geiger.  I will try to always have a poll open, so when you stop by, vote!  And remember that you can always leave suggestion in the comments, even if it isn't at all relevant to the subject of the post.  But on to more serious business. (And I do apologize.  In rereading this post, it is kind of dull.)

Hans Geiger was born in Germany and received his PhD from the University of Erlangen in 1906.  After graduating, he went to England to work at the University of Manchester with Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in physics for his work with radioactive substances.  One of the first projects that Geiger collaborated on in Rutherford's lab was the famous gold foil experiment, also called the Geiger-Marsden experiment (Marsden was an undergrad working with Geiger) or the Rutherford experiment.  In this experiment, where helium nuclei (alpha particles) were fired at a thin sheet of gold, Rutherford hoped to better understand the actual composition of atoms.  When some of the particles deflected at very high angles, a reasonable explanation was that rather than having the mass of an atom spread fairly evenly, there must be a highly concentrated nucleus to an atom.  This experiment was vital to the modern understanding of the structure of the atom.

Geiger continued to work with alpha-particles, developing the first detector for alpha particles in 1908.  This consisted of a wire in a low pressure chamber with a voltage applied across the wire and the outside of the tube.  The voltage is high enough that a current can almost, but not quite, flow through the gas. When an ionizing particle came into contact with the wire, it disturbs the system enough to complete the circuit, and the resulting completion can be detected by an audible click or by a pointer, depending on the type of counter. Design variables included the applied voltage, the pressure inside the chamber, and the length and diameter of the tube. Geiger continued to try to make more sensitive devices, and in 1913, after returning to Berlin to work at the German National Institute for Science and Technology, created a more sensitive device that used a needle that stuck into the middle of the detecting tube, rather than a wire connected at both ends.  This version was able to detect both alpha and beta particles.

Geiger served as an artillery officer during World War I, and when he returned to direct radiation research at the University of Kiel and the University of Tübingen, and later at Technische Hochschule in Berlin. It was while working with a post-doc, Walther Müller, at Kiel, that the next breakthrough in the Geiger counter occurred.  Geiger wanted Müller to determine the precise effect of a positive ion on the counter, and in general to test different configurations, voltages, polarities, etc.  It was as a result of this that Müller discovered a configuration that lead to an increase in sensitivity of about 100 times, which is why in many publications and discussions of Geiger counters, one finds them called Geiger-Müller counters.  The increased sensitivity of this counter made them more useful for the detection of cosmic rays, which were a subject of much interest around that time.  They could also be combined with cloud chambers to watch electrons moving individually.

After this discovery, the sources that I have found don't talk about what Geiger did next much.  He continued researching radiation in various forms, including cosmic rays and nuclear fission.  He was involved in the German efforts to create a nuclear bomb, and died a few months after World War II ended.  What I find most interesting about his story is that he, more than many of the other people that I have written about so far, worked in collaborations.  The gold-foil experiment was done with Marsden, but the conclusions about the atom were Rutherford's.  The improved Geiger counter was the work of a student.  I think this way of doing research is much more what we are familiar with today, when papers can have ten co-authors and, especially as a graduate student, one's advisor's name is on everything.  Clearly, Geiger made important contributions, but he was not working alone.

Works by Geiger
References and Further Reading
  • "Hans Geiger". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Accessed July 13, 2012.
  • Thaddeus Trenn, "The Geiger-Müller Counter of 1928", Annals of Science 43, 2 (1986), 111-135.
  • "Geiger Counter", Lemelson-MIT Inventor of the Week, February 2005.
  • M. Walter and A. W. Wolfendale, "Early history of cosmic particle physics", The European Physical Journal H (2012). doi:  10.1140/epjh/e2012-30020-1
  • Paul Frame, "A history of radiation detection instrumentation", Health Physics 88, 6 (2005), 613-637.
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Friday, June 22, 2012

Arnold Sommerfeld: Father of Quantum Physicists

Arnold Sommerfeld
(1868-1951)
Arnold Sommerfeld is a man that I had not heard of until taking a course in solid state physics.  And I apologize to those of you who may hear the name with dread, but despite creating the Sommerfeld Equation, he really is an interesting guy, so please stick with me.  And I will only mention the Sommerfeld Equation one more time.  While he appears to have been known in his own time as a great mathematician and physicist, he is even better known by the students that he advised.  These include Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, and Alfred Landé, among many others.  And these are just the students considered to be his advisees by the mathematics genealogy project.  Others famous men who studied with Sommerfeld include Linus Pauling, Léon Brillouin, and Rudolf Peierls.  He also has the unfortunate honor of being the man between 1901 and 1950 to receive the most nominations for a Nobel Prize without actually winning one, receiving eighty-one nominations.

Arnold Sommerfeld was born in 1868 in Germany, and studied mathematics and natural science at the University of Köningsberg, receiving his PhD in 1891.  He was an assistant professor at the University of Göttingen in mathematics and in mineralogy, before becoming a professor of mathematics at the Mining Academy of Claustel and then a professor of mechanics at the Institute of Technology of Aachen.  In 1906 he become the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich, a position that had previously been held by Ludwig Boltzmann.  The University of Munich was well known in the field of theoretical physics, so this was both a great honor and a wonderful opportunity for Sommerfeld to influence a new generation of physicists.  He taught there from 1906 to 1935, when he retired.

When he receive the post of chair of Theoretical Physics, Sommerfeld wanted to learn more about the field, since he himself was a mathematician, not a physicist.  He asked Abraham Joffe, who had helped to discover x-rays, for help in understanding physics.  He suggested that they meet every morning at a café to discuss experimental physics, and these discussions quickly included many more scholars eager to discuss new ideas. Apparently he was a great lecturer, and was able to explain the complexities of atomic structure and other confusing topics with great clarity.

His research started out in the field of the propagation of radio waves, which now seems rather outdated, but at that time was of vital importance.  The telephone had been developed in the late nineteenth century, but by 1900, most people conveyed important communications by telegraph.  While telegraphs traveled by wires in many parts of the country, telegraphs to ships required radio waves, and the difficulties with sustaining a cable across the Atlantic meant that transatlantic communications would have to be by radio waves.  The first wireless telegraph was patented in 1897 by Guglielmo Marconi (who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 for his work with wireless telegraphy), and the first transatlantic telegraphic communications via radio waves were accomplished in 1901.  Sommerfeld's 1909 paper "The Propagation of Waves in Wireless Telegraphy" was thus of vital importance at the time, and has been oft cited.

As well as working with radio waves, Sommerfeld also worked with x-rays, still a very new and mysterious phenomenon, and his student Max von Laue showed that x-rays are also an electromagnetic wave (and won a Nobel Prize for it).  Sommerfeld went on to develop the relativistic quantum theory of the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum.  Quantum theory is difficult enough, but adding relativity is quite an accomplishment.  I first met the name Sommerfeld when considering the electronic theory of metals, where he developed the Sommerfeld Equation as a method to approximate functions as a function of temperature. He is also famous for his work with atomic theory and atomic physics, in the end publishing a six volume series on the subject of theoretical physics and going on two lecture tours in the United States.  Unfortunately, however, he met his death as a result of an automobile accident in 1951.  As Linus Pauling wrote, "The hazard of a mechanized world has prevented his students from celebrating during his lifetime still further anniversaries of the birth of this great man."

Other works by Sommerfeld
  • "Über die Ausbreitung der Wellen in der drahtlosen Telegraphie (The propagation of waves in wireless telegraphy)", Ann. der Phys., 28 (March 1909), 665-736. (This is the same as volume 333.  They renumbered them in 2010.)  doi: 10.1002/andp.19093330402
  • "Über die Ausbreitung der Wellen in der drahtlosen Telegraphie (The propagation of waves in wireless telegraphy)", Ann. der Phys., 81 (December 1926), 1135-1153.  (Now volume 386) doi: 10.1002/andp.19263862516.

References and further reading
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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Svante Arrhenius: A Man of Many Interests

Svante Arrhenius
(1859 - 1927)
I'm sorry it's been awhile since my last post, but classwork caught up with me at last. I've been planning to write on Svante Arrhenius for two months now, when he came up in several homework assignments at the same time, and I expected this to be a simple post to write, since Arrhenius is best known, in my opinion, for his equation connecting the activation energy of a process and its kinetics. First, I found out that this was not the work for which he earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and, more surprisingly, I discovered that he was also one of the first scientists to work out the effects of the greenhouse effect and he also postulated global warming resulting from human CO2 production. So between classwork, research, and Arrhenius being a more complicated person to write on than I though, this post has taken a while.  I will do my best to represent what Arrhenius actually wrote about global warming, but I can't read everything he wrote about the subject for this short post, so if you are curious, I would encourage you to look at some of his original writings, which are referenced and linked throughout.

Arrhenius was born in Vik, Sweden, in 1859.  His father was a land surveyor associated with the University of Uppsala, and the following year the family moved to Uppsala.  Here Arrhenius studied at the cathedral school, showing aptitude in mathematics.  He studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Uppsala, but wanted a more rigorous physics education and went to Stockholm to study with Erik Edlund.  His work there resulted in his thesis, "Investigations on the galvanic conductivity of electrolytes."  This post's moral for graduate students is don't be discouraged if people think your ideas are wrong.  When Arrhenius submitted this thesis to the University of Uppsala, some of the professors were doubtful of its merit.  He proposed what is now universally accepted, that some chemical species dissociate in water into positive and negative ions, and that the degree of dissociation can depend on the concentration.  Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had already proposed ionic species, but only in the presence of an electric current.  In the end, his thesis was accepted.

One of the main proponents of his ideas was Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), with whom Arrhenius was able to work as a result of a travel grant from the Academy of Sciences in the late 1880s.  He also worked with Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), an Austrian physicist who was a proponent of the atom and a developer of statistical thermodynamics; Jacobus van 't Hoff (1852-1911), a Dutch chemist who studied, among other things, chemical kinetics and osmotic pressure; and Frederich Kohlsrauch (1840-1910), a German physicist also interested in the conductivity of electrolytic solutions.  Arrhenius's theory of electrolytes helped to explain some abnormalities in osmotic pressure data that van 't Hoff had found, and his discussions with these men enabled him to elaborate on his theory of dissociation to explain increases from the expected boiling point elevations and freezing point depressions in some materials by species dissociation.  These men were all instrumental in the formation of the modern field of physical chemistry. It was for this work, begun in his dissertation, that he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903.

As I mentioned before, Arrhenius also studied the greenhouse effect.  The greenhouse effect, that the Earth's atmosphere can trap heat from the sun, had been proposed earlier by Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) in the 1820s.  John Tyndall (1820-1893), proved that both water and carbon dioxide can act as what we now call greenhouse gasses.  Arrhenius took their ideas and applied them to the question of whether the cycles of ice ages could be explained by changes in carbon dioxide in the air.  He did the extensive calculations to show that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the air doubled, the temperature of the earth would increase by five to six degrees Celsius.  He published these findings in the the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science under the title "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground" in 1896.  He had worked with his friend Arvid Högbom (1857-1940), a professor of geology at the University of Uppsala, who had considered carbon dioxide cycles over time.  Arrhenius went further, and in his book Worlds in the Making (1908, p. 54), suggested that the burning of coal could be leading to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though much of it is absorbed into the oceans.

Arrhenius lived for thirty more years and did many more things, including being the head of the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry.  But, I've gone on for a bit about him already and hit some of the highlights, so I'm going to stop here.  If you are still interested in Arrhenius, you might want to look up his writings on popular science (including Worlds in the Making and Life of the Universe); his work on hydroelectric power, the electrification of the Swedish railroads, and immunochemistry; and his successful efforts to obtain the release of scientists made prisoners of war during World War I.  But to touch on those would mean more for you to read, and, more importantly, more for me to research, so I will leave Arrhenius with that.

Other works by Arrhenius


References and further reading

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