Background
Wilhelm Schulz was born in 1912 in Berlin and moved to New York with his family in 1924.
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Helmut Schulz
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Later, he received a Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia University and earned a Bachelor of Surgery in 1933 and a Master of Surgery in 1934.
Career
He developed the process for separating uranium isotopes. He was valedictorian at Brooklyn Technical High School. Upon graduation, he went to work for Union Carbide and traveled in 1940 to Niagara Falls to help improve its methanol plant.
While experimenting, he used a contaminated bottle of solution which exploded on contact.
The caustic splattering blinded him. When the government settled on the gaseous diffusion process to enrich uranium, Schulz filed for a patent in 1942 which was granted in 1951.
Returning to Union Carbide after receiving his Doctor of Philosophy in chemical engineering from Columbia in 1942, Schulz wrote two papers on the possibility of using infrared radiation to generate molecular reactions. In 1948, Schulz approached Charles H. Townes at Columbia University and offered him a Union Carbide fellowship.
Impressed by Schulz"s inventiveness, Townes used his fellowship to hire Arthur L. Schawlow.
In the 1960s, Schulz developed new ways to produce solid rocket fuel and then took a leave from Union Carbide to oversee the United States Department of Defense"s rocket propulsion program Finally retiring from Union Carbide in 1969, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Schulz returned to Columbia to study ways to convert waste to energy. He developed clean processes to produce electricity using solid waste, sewage sludge and even toxic materials like Polychlorinated Biphenyls , and chemical weapons.
In 1977, when the United States planned to build the first gas centrifuge plant, the United States Department of Energy awarded Schulz $100,000 as a royalty for his contribution.
Achievements
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When Schulz learned that physicists at Columbia University had achieved fission of a uranium isotope, he worked and succeeded in devising a process for separating uranium isotopes using gas centrifuge, presenting his idea in a paper to university researchers. Both received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Born
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Died
January 28, 2006 (aged 94) -
Nationality
United States