Arthur Becket Lamb

Background

Arthur Becket Lamb was born in Attleboro, Massachussets, the son of Louis Jacob Lamb, a jewelry manufacturer, and Elizabeth Camerden Townsend Becket Lamb.

Education

He attended school in Attleboro, where he was a precocious student with many interests, including astronomy, microscopy, chemistry, physics, and other sciences. He entered Tufts College in 1896 and received both the A. B. and A. M. in 1900. Although he at first leaned toward zoology (his master's thesis dealt with eye muscles of the dogfish), Lamb was attracted to chemistry through one of his professors, Arthur Michael. Lamb continued to study both zoology and chemistry at Tufts until 1902, when he matriculated at Harvard to concentrate on chemistry. Between 1902 and 1904 he incorporated the results of his Tufts zoological research into a thesis while concurrently doing research at Harvard. In 1904 he received Ph. D. degrees from both institutions. A fellowship from Harvard gave Lamb an opportunity to study at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg. He also attended lectures by Fritz Haber at Karlsruhe, and after the lectures were published, he obtained permission to translate them into English as Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions (1908).

Career

Lamb returned to the United States in 1905 and became an instructor in electrochemistry at Harvard. The following year he went to New York University as director of Havemeyer Chemistry Laboratory. He served successively as assistant professor, associate professor (1907), and professor (1909 - 1912) of chemistry.

In 1912 he returned to Harvard as assistant professor and director of the chemistry laboratories. In 1915 poison gas was first used successfully on a large scale as a weapon of war, and two years later the United States Bureau of Mines undertook research on chemical warfare. When the United States entered World War I the bureau expanded its organization, and in the summer of 1917 Lamb received a leave of absence from Harvard to work with the bureau in Washington, D. C.

He was made supervisor of several groups developing adsorbents for gas masks, particularly for protection against carbon monoxide in gun turrets. In June 1918 the bureau's chemical warfare organization was absorbed by the army, and Lamb was commissioned a lieutenant colonel.

After the war he was offered a permanent post with the Chemical Warfare Service, but he declined. The respirators and canister adsorbents developed by Lamb and his colleagues during the war proved useful in industry. Lamb was granted several patents, some with coinventors. He effected an arrangement with other inventors to pool patents, license their use, and prorate royalties during the life of the patents.

Meanwhile, in 1919 Lamb was offered the directorship of a laboratory to carry out research and development of methods for preparing nitrogen fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen. The government had built a plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, during the war to produce nitrates for munitions, and it proposed to convert this plant to manufacture fertilizers. Lamb accompanied a mission to Europe to inspect plants built during the war, and upon his return to Washington organized the Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory, using the facilities of the deserted chemical warfare laboratories.

In 1920 Harvard promoted Lamb to the rank of professor and gave him the choice of returning to the university or resigning. He decided to leave the nitrogen laboratory, and in the autumn of 1921 went back to Harvard, where, for more than a quarter of a century, he had charge of the elementary chemistry course. He also taught a course in electrochemistry and directed the studies of several graduate students, mainly in the fields of gas adsorption and cobaltammines.

During the 1920's Lamb, as director of laboratories, had to spend much of his time overseeing the financing, planning, design, and construction of the new buildings that were needed as Harvard broadened its chemical instruction. The Mallinckrodt and Converse laboratories, as well as Byerly Hall at Harvard's sister institution, Radcliffe College, were erected under his supervision. He was appointed Sheldon Emery professor in 1925 and Erving professor in 1929. Lamb may be remembered longest for his editorship of the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 1917 to 1949. During this period the number of chemists in the United States tripled and the number of chemical manuscripts increased even more. The Journal accepted twenty papers a month in 1917 and five times that many in 1949. Lamb had to recruit assistants and referees, cope with decreasing circulation during the Great Depression and rising costs at other times, maintain a general chemical journal during a period of increasing specialization, and meet a deadline each month for thirty-two years. He set high standards for the articles he accepted, and although he at times provoked resentment and anger among contributors, he was generally fair, tactful, and helpful to young chemists submitting their first papers.

In 1933 Lamb was president of the American Chemical Society. He served as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard from 1940 to 1943, and as director of the laboratories until 1947. He retired one year later. He died suddenly en route from his office at Harvard to his home in Brookline, Massachussets.

Achievements

• Lamb was a distinguished American scientist. He developed the respirators and canister adsorbents during the World War I that had been used later in the industry. He was a founder of the Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory. He also guided the planning and construction of the Mallinckrodt, Converse and Byerly laboratories. Under his editorship, the size and the scientific importance of the "Journal of the American Chemical Society" increased greatly. He received the Nichols Medal of the American Chemical Society's New York section (1943), the Priestley Medal of the society (1949), and the Patterson Award of the society's Dayton section (1951).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Laboratory Manual of General Chemistry: With Exercises in the Preparation of Inorganic Substances

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Thermodynamics of Technical Gas-reactions: Seven Lectures

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Connections

Lamb married Blanche Anne Driscoll on December 27, 1923. They had two children.

Father:

Louis Jacob Lamb

Jewelry manufacturer

Mother:

Elizabeth Camerden Townsend Becket Lamb

Spouse:

Blanche Anne Driscoll

References

• Arthur Becket Lamb, 1880-1952: A Biographical Memoir