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Nobel. Michael Worek
Читать онлайн.Название Nobel
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781770853225
Автор произведения Michael Worek
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Jean Henry Dunant seemed destined to dedicate his life to others. The son of a respected and prosperous couple, he grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, admiring his parents’ philanthropic efforts within their community. At the age of six, he went with his father, Jean Jacques, on a visit to a penitentiary in Toulon, France. For the little Dunant, the sight of the chained prisoners was shocking and had lasting effects. Later in life, this memory led him to dedicate his Sunday afternoons to visiting prisoners.
Entering the world of business, Dunant first went to Algeria, where he managed an estate. A number of difficulties arose for him in the French territory, however, due to his Swiss citizenship. He decided that the best hope of resolving his problems was to speak personally with Emperor Napoleon III and convince the Emperor to grant him concessions to explore new lands. When news arrived that Napoleon III was leading French troops in Italy to expel the Austrians at what was to be the Battle of Solferino, Dunant made his way north to meet the Emperor.
When he arrived at Solferino, however, his intentions were shattered upon witnessing the violence of the fighting. When the battle was over, one of the bloodiest of the 19th century, Dunant put his own concerns aside and began ministering to the needy. In 1862 he published A Memory of Solferino. The book brought him fame and presented a detailed plan to create a structure aimed at supporting the wounded in times of war. This effort led to the formation of the International Red Cross, which he established in 1863. It was recognized a year later by the Geneva Convention, and the idea was worthy of the first Nobel Peace Prize.
Dunant set aside his business concerns to dedicate himself to helping others, and it is no surprise that he went bankrupt in 1867. After his setbacks in business, which also involved some of his friends in Geneva, Dunant was no longer welcome in his hometown. Instead he chose to live in Heiden, a small Swiss town, where he lived mostly in obscurity. He fell ill in 1892 and was transferred to the hospital in Heiden, where he would die 18 years later.
After 1895, while Dunant remained hospitalized, he was recognized more frequently and was honored with various prizes, including the Order of Christ in 1897, awarded by Portugal. Dunant, who never married or had children, maintained his generosity to the end, giving the money from his prizes to those who cared for him in the hospital and to humanitarian institutions in Norway and Switzerland.
Frédéric Passy also received half of the prize.
Emil Fischer (1852–1919)
1902 Chemistry
In recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his work on sugar and purine syntheses.
Hermann Emil Fischer always possessed an excellent memory, a fascination with scientific problems and a rare determination to prove hypotheses. These characteristics were essential for someone who would go on to become one of the greatest scientists of all time. Against his father’s will, who would have liked his son to continue the family timber business in Cologne, Germany, Fischer pursued the natural sciences, especially physics, and was rewarded for his dedication.
After three years with a private tutor, the young German attended the local school. He also studied in Wetzlar and Bonn, where he passed his final exam with distinction in 1869. Faced with his son’s insistence on studying science, his father decided to enroll him in the University of Bonn to study chemistry. What Fischer really wanted, however, was to dedicate himself to physics. One year later, accompanied by his cousin, Otto Fischer, he left for the University of Strasbourg. There he met Adolf von Baeyer, whose influence finally persuaded him to return to chemistry.
In 1874 he took his doctorate and was also appointed assistant teacher at Strasbourg. He continued his studies and discovered the first hydrazine base, phenylhydrazine, and showed its relationship with hydrazobenzene and sulphonic acid. In 1875, Adolf von Baeyer went to the University of Munich, and Fischer accompanied him as his assistant in the subject of organic chemistry. Later Fischer taught at the universities of Erlangen and Wurzburg, and in 1892 he was invited to the University of Berlin where he stayed until his death.
Fischer left his mark on research in every university in which he worked. In Munich he continued his studies in the field of hydrazenes and, along with his cousin Otto, formulated a new theory on the constitution of dyes derived from triphenylmethane. In Erlangen he studied the active ingredients of tea, coffee and cocoa and established the constitution of a series of components in this field. His work on sugars between 1884 and 1894 were significant, particularly his synthesis of glucose, fructose and mannose and his studies of glycosides.
His research into purines and sugars was recognized with the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Fischer also contributed to the study of proteins, enzymes and other chemical substances. His dedication to chemistry was further acknowledged with the Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society in 1906, the Elliot Cresson Gold Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1913, and many other distinctions. After his death, the German Chemical Society initiated a prize in his name, the Emil Fischer Memorial Medal.
Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927)
1903 Chemistry
In recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation.
The Swede Svante August Arrhenius, father of the ionic theory that explains the movement of electric currents in solutions, was born in Vik to a family of farmers. When he was only a year old his parents moved to Uppsala, where he first attended school; he demonstrated a rare facility for solving mathematical problems and an unusual interest in physics and mathematics.
In 1876 he entered the University of Uppsala, the oldest university in Sweden, to study mathematics, chemistry and physics. In 1881 he moved to the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. After working as an assistant to a professor he developed his doctoral thesis on the galvanic conductivity of electrolytes. Arrhenius concluded that electrical conductivity was possible in a solution due to the presence of ions. He was to later say that “the idea occurred on the night of the May 17, 1883, and I could not look at anything else until I had solved the problem.”
The relationship between electricity and chemistry was rejected by the scientific community at the time. However, while jury members raised many doubts about the new theory, Arrhenius obtained his doctorate in 1884. He lectured in physical chemistry at Uppsala, the first Swede to lecture in this branch of science, and, in 1895, he became a physics professor at the Stockholm Högskola (the “High School of Stockholm,” a private foundation that was the equivalent of a university science faculty). Arrhenius managed to win over many scientists in diverse fields and, in 1903, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, his theory for electrolytic dissociation having been widely accepted by that time. Two years later, despite being made various offers from universities, he stopped giving classes and became chief of the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry, newly created by the Academy of Sciences.
Arrhenius accumulated various distinctions, including being the first foreigner to be elected to the Royal Society and receiving a medal from the Chemical Society, among other prizes. He also published many popular books that could be understood by a non-scientific public. His interests in astronomy led him to propose a new theory on the formation of the solar system, based on the collision of stars, and he did valuable research into the use of chemical serum in fighting diseases.
Both in his professional and private life, Arrhenius was a quiet but happy man. During World War I he showed great bravery, successfully freeing and repatriating German and Austrian scientists. He married twice, first in 1894 to Sofia Rudbeck, with whom he had a son, and then to Maria Johansson in