Svante August Arrhenius

Svante August Arr henius was born at Uppalsa, Sweden, on February 19, 1859 His intelligence and creative thinking were apperent nt from an early age--he taught himself to read when he was three Although credi ted with many scientific innovations, he remains scoop give away known for his bean guess of solutions, For which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in pill pusherry in 1903 Arrhenius henius died in Stockholm on October 2, 1927 Science is a human endeavor subject to human frailties and governed by personalities, politics, and prejudice ces. One of the best illustrations of the of tenner bumpy path of the advancement of scientific know takege is the story of Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. When Arrhenius henius began his doctorate at the University of Uppsala approximately 1880, he chose to study the passage of electricity through solutions. This was a problem that had baffled scientists for a century, The first experiments had been done in the 17 70s by Cavendish, who corn pared the conductivity of salt solutions with that of come down water, using his own physiological reaction to the electric shocks he rece ived! Arrhenius had an array of instruments to measure electric current, nevertheless the process of conservatively weighing, meas uring, and recording data from a multitude of experiments was a boring one.

After his long series of experimerits were performed, Arrhenius quit his laboratory workbench and re dour to his country home to try to formulate a deterrent example that could account for his data, He wrote, I got the topic in the darkness of the 17th of May in the year 1883, and I could non s leep that night until I had worked through the whole problem. His idea was that ions were responsible for conducting electricity through a solution.

B ack at Uppsa]a, Arrhenius took his doctoral dissertation containing the impudently theo ry to his advisor, Professor Cleve, an eminent chemist and the discoverer of the elements holmlum and thulium. Cleves unlnterested response was what Arrhenius had expected. It was in keeping with CIeves resistance to new ideas he had not all the same pass judgment Mendeleevs periodic table, introduced ten years earlier.

It is a long standing custom that forrader a doctoral degree is granted the disse rtation must be defended before a panel of professors. Although this procedure i s still followed at most universities today, the problems are usually worked out in private with the evaluating professors before the actual defense. However, w hen Arrhenius did it, the disserta tion defense was an open debate, which could be rancorous and humiliating. Knowing that it would be unwise to antagonize his professors, Arrhenius downplayed his convictions about his new hypothesis as he de t ended his dissertation. His diplomacy paid take: he was awarded his degree, albei t reluctantly, as the prolessors still did not conceive his model and considered him to be a marginal scientist, at best.

such(prenominal) a setback could ca-ca ende d his scientific career, but Arrhenius was a crusader; he was determined to see his theory triumph. Recognizing his low credibility in his home coun try, he sen t his dissertation first to Rudolf Clausius, a German seientist who had fimnulat ed the sulfur law of thermodynamics, but Clausius wasnt interested. He next app roached Lothar Meyer, other German scientist who had gained prominence for his work on the periodicity of the clements, but Meyer was to a fault unresponsive. Final ly, Arrhcnius found the right champion in Wilhelm Ostwald, a German profes sor o f chemistry at Riga.

Ostwald, already known as a defender of revo lutionary chem ical causes, fully accepted the idea that reactions in solu tion often involve i ons.

In 1885 Arrhenius began work ing in Ostwalds laboratory, continui ng his research on ions. information everything he could find on the sub jeer, he ca me across a research paper written by a Dutch scientist, Jacobus vant Heir, whi ch was particularly helpful in placing the ionic theory on firmer gnound.



In 1887 Arrhenius went to Amsterdalm to nicer vanl Heft At 22 years of age, vant Help had postulated the existence of stereochemistry; that is, that atoms in molecules behave explicit relative positions in space. This theory was initially criticized harshly, and vant Heft, aided by Ostwald, had to fight to have it accepted. The ionic theory was yet another unaccepted theory for which both Ostwald and vant Heft would extend their support.

By the judgment of conviction Arrhenius returned from Amsterdam, Ostwald had moved to Leipzig, where he had be come professor of chemistry. It was thither that Ostwald and Anhenius put together a promotional strategy that would have done credit to a canny politician. In the so new journal Zeitschrift fur Physikalische Chemic, Ostwald wrote about the ionic theory, and at long last the European scientific establishment began to listen. Arrheniuss classic paper On the Dissociation of Substances in Aque ous Solulhms was published in 1887.

The ionic theory had become one of thc most ctmtroversal issues in science.

Although Ostwald, vant Holt, and Arrhenius move to champion the cause vigorously. many scientists remained vebenmently opposed to the theory. In fact, even though Arrhenius was by then a prominent scientist, his trying on as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Stockholm was passing con troversial.

Ultimately, the ionic theory triumphed. Arrheniuss fame spread, and honors were heaped on him, culminating in cover Nobel Prize in chemistry. Nol one to rest on his laurels, Arrhenius turned to new fields, in cluding astronomy; he formulated a new theory that the solar system may have come into being through the collision of stars. His exceptional versatility led him to study the use of serums to tight disease, energy resources and conservation, and the origin of life.

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