Svante August Arrhenius, 1859 – 1927, Swedish scientist.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
the University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
From 1881 to 1884 Arrhenius studied at the University of Stockholm, physical chemistry.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
the University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden
Arrhenius entered the University of Uppsala at the age of seventeen. He studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and passed the candidate’s examination in 1878.
Career
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
1903
Svante Arrhenius (1859-192), Swedish Physicist and Chemist, 1903.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
1903
Incomplete annotation of a photograph of Svante Arrhenius. Image by author.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
1903
Svante Arrhenius working in his laboratory.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
1909
Svante Arrhenius in his laboratory, 1909.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
1922
Arrhenius at the first Solvay conference on chemistry in 1922 in Brussels.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius, Swedish Chemist Art Print.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
Arrhenius (second standing from the right) together with Walther Nernst (first standing from right), Wilhelm Kohlrausch (sitting, first from left), Friedrich Kohlrausch (sitting, middle) and other scholars.
Gallery of Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius in his later years studying.
Achievements
Membership
the Royal Society of London
1910 - 1927
the Royal Society, London, England, United Kingdom
Arrhenius was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1910.
Awards
Franklin Medal
In 1920 Arrhenius received the Franklin Medal, the most prestigious of the various awards presented by the Franklin Institute.
Davy Medal
In 1902 Arrhenius was awarded the Davy Medal issued by the Royal Society of London "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry".
Svante Arrhenius, Swedish Physicist and Chemist. Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
Arrhenius entered the University of Uppsala at the age of seventeen. He studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and passed the candidate’s examination in 1878.
In 1902 Arrhenius was awarded the Davy Medal issued by the Royal Society of London "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry".
Arrhenius (second standing from the right) together with Walther Nernst (first standing from right), Wilhelm Kohlrausch (sitting, first from left), Friedrich Kohlrausch (sitting, middle) and other scholars.
Agnes Wold, born 1955, professor of clinical bacteriology specializing in the normal flora of the body.
teacher: Erik Edlund
colleague: Van't Hoff
colleague: Wilhelm Ostwald
Wilhelm Ostwald by Nicola Perscheid
colleague: Arvid Gustaf Högbom
Arvid Gustaf Högbom was Swedish geologist active at Uppsala University.
Friend: Theodore William Richards
Theodore William Richards (January 31, 1868 – April 2, 1928) was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."
Svante August Arrhenius was a Nobel-Prize winning Swedish scientist, physicist, but often referred to as a chemist. He is regarded as one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry who was the first to apply physical chemistry to predict the extent of global warming based on increased carbon dioxide emissions. He proposed that the gases carbon dioxide and water vapor were being trapped by the earth's atmosphere.
Background
Svante August Arrhenius was born on February 19, 1859, at Vik (also spelled Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. He came from a Swedish farming family where his father had been a land surveyor for Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory position. He also was employed as overseer on the ancient estate of Vik (Wijk), on Lake Malar near Uppsala. In 1855 he married Carolina Christina Thunberg; Svante August was their second son. By the beginning of 1860, the father’s position had improved enough so that the family moved to Uppsala, where he could devote full time to his university position.
Education
At eight, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in physics and mathematics, and graduating as the youngest and most able student in 1876. After attending the Cathedral School in Uppsala, Arrhenius entered the University of Uppsala at the age of seventeen. He studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and passed the candidate’s examination in 1878. He studied at Upsala from 1876 to 1881 and at Stockholm from 1881 to 1884. In 1884 Arrhenius obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Uppsala with a thesis on the conductivities of electrolytic solutions. He returned in Upsala as privat-docent in physical chemistry. Afterwards, he went to Stockholm to study under Erik Edlund, who attempted to discourage Arrhenius from the pursuit of chemistry.
After obtaining his Ph.D. degree from the University of Uppsala, Arrhenius remained there after earning his doctorate as a docent in physical chemistry. Through Edlund’s influence, he was awarded a traveling fellowship from the Academy of Sciences which enabled him to work in 1886 with Ostwald in Riga and with Kohlrausch in Würzburg. In 1887 he was with Boltzmann in Graz and in 1888 he worked Amsterdam. During these years Arrhenius was able to prove the influence of the electrolytic dissociation on the osmotic pressure, the lowering of the freezing point and increase of the boiling point of solutions containing electrolytes. Later on, he studied its importance in connection with biological problems such as the relationship between toxins and antitoxins, serum therapy, its role for digestion and absorption as well as for the gastric and pancreatic juices. The paramount importance of the electrolytic dissociation theory is today universally acknowledged, even if certain modifications have been found necessary.
In 1891, Arrhenius declined a professorship offered to him from Giessen, Germany, and soon afterwards he obtained a lectureship in physics at Stockholms Högskola. In 1895 he became Professor of Physics there. He was in addition Rector from 1897 to 1905, when he retired from the professorship. He had got an invitation to a professorship in Berlin, and the Academy of Sciences then decided (1905) to start a Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry with Arrhenius as its chief. Initially, he had to work in a rented flat, but a new building was inaugurated in 1909. A large number of collaborators came to him from Sweden and from other countries and helped to give his ideas wider currency.
In 1900 Arrhenius published his Lärobok i teoretisk elektrokemi (Textbook of theoretical electrochemistry), in 1906 followed Theorien der Chemie (Theories of Chemistry) and Immunochemistry and in 1918 the Silliman lectures Theories of solutions. He took a lively interest in various branches of physics, as illustrated by his theory of the importance of the CO2-content of the atmosphere for the climate, his discussion of the possibility that radiation pressure might enable the spreading of living spores through the universe (panspermy) and by his various contributions to our knowledge of the northern lights. In 1903 appeared his Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik (Textbook of cosmic physics).
Many lectures and short publications gave witness of his interest and capacity for writing for the general public. Especially during the last decades of his life, he published a number of popular books, which were usually translated into several languages and appeared in numerous editions. To these belong Världarnas utveckling (1906, Worlds in the Making), Stjärnornas Öden (1915, Destiny of the Stars) and others. In 1913 appeared Smittkopporna och deras bekämpande (Smallpox and its combating) and in 1919 Kemien och det moderna livet (Chemistry and modern Life).
Arrhenius was elected a Foreign member of the Royal Society in 1911, and was awarded the Society’s Davy medal and also the Faraday Medal of the Chemical Society (1914). Among the many tokens of distinction that he received were honorary degrees from the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Greifswald, Groningen, Heidelberg, Leipzig and Oxford.
During the First World War, he made successful efforts to release and repatriate German and Austrian scientists who had been made prisoners of war.
Svante Arrhenius suffered a serious attack of acute intestinal catarrh in September 1927. He died a few days later, on October 2, 1927. Buried in Uppsala, Arrhenius was 68 years old.
Gordon Stein wrote that Svante Arrhenius was an atheist.
Views
Throughout his career, Arrhenius followed this interdisciplinary approach, also becoming interested in different questions and phenomena in fields as diverse as meteorology, climatology and cosmology. Arrhenius hypothesized that water vapor and carbon dioxide gas could absorb infrared radiation, or heat, and increase the temperature of the earth. This is similar to how a greenhouse stays warm all year long, so these gasses were called 'greenhouse gases.' Arrhenius wrote the paper "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground." Evidence for his hypothesis wasn't discovered until the middle of the twentieth century, when infrared spectroscopy measured the amounts of carbon dioxide.
At the time, Arrhenius believed that global warming might be beneficial. He believed it meant that people could begin to live where there were colder climates, and more food could be produced for the rising population of people. This was until Fritz Haber discovered how to pull nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizer in 1909, a huge concern among scientists was food production.
In his later years, Arrhenius applied the concepts of physical chemistry and physics to many other branches of science, including biochemistry, geoand cosmic physics, and meteorology. In retrospect, his most remarkable contribution was perhaps his model of the greenhouse effect, according to which the temperature of Earth's lower atmosphere is determined by the concentration of carbon dioxide. Earth's surface, after being warmed by sunlight, emits energy in the form of infrared radiation, which is absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide; the absorption of infrared radiation leads to heat. At that time, the greenhouse effect model was used to explain the glacial periods, rather than any climatic changes induced by the human production of carbon dioxide, as is the case today.
Arrhenius warned of the risks of the growing CO2 emissions by man and the consequent climate change, almost a century before the world decided to fight global warming. Despite all its serious implications, his study was largely ignored at the time. It was not until the 1970s, when the greenhouse effect began to emerge as a real and imminent concern, that the work of the Swedish scientist was given the value that it deserved.
Arrhenius also performed extensive research on bacterial toxins and various plant and animal poisons and “Quantitative laws on Biochemistry” was published in 1915 based on his 1914 lectures at The Royal Institution in London.
Quotations:
“I was led to the conclusion that at the most extreme dilutions all salts would consist of simple conducting molecules. But the conducting molecules are, according to the hypothesis of Clausius and Williamson, dissociated; hence at extreme dilutions all salt molecules are completely disassociated. The degree of dissociation can be simply found on this assumption by taking the ratio of the molecular conductivity of the solution in question to the molecular conductivity at the most extreme dilution.”
“In a great number of the cosmogonic myths the world is said to have developed from a great water, which was the prime matter. In many cases, as for instance in an Indian myth, this prime matter is indicated as a solution, out of which the solid earth crystallized out.”
“At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially the Stoics, concluded this concept to be quite unnecessary. The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion as those philosophers, Empedocles and Democritus in particular, who lived around 500 B.C.E. and for whom even ancient man had a lively admiration.”
“Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.”
"Chemistry works with an enormous number of substances, but cares only for some few of their properties; it is an extensive science. Physics on the other hand works with rather few substances, such as mercury, water, alcohol, glass, air, but analyses the experimental results very thoroughly; it is an intensive science. Physical chemistry is the child of these two sciences; it has inherited the extensive character from chemistry. Upon this depends its all-embracing feature, which has attracted so great admiration. But on the other hand it has its profound quantitative character from the science of physics."
"In a great number of the cosmogonic myths the world is said to have developed from a great water, which was the prime matter. In many cases, as for instance in an Indian myth, this prime matter is indicated as a solution, out of which the solid earth crystallized out."
Membership
Arrhenius was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1910. He was also a board member for the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene (founded 1909), which endorsed Mendelism at the time, and contributed to the topic of contraceptives around 1910.
the Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1910 - 1927
Personality
Arrhenius was a contented man, happy in his work and in his family life. “No one should ever bring you down” – a mantra that could sum up how Svante Arrhenius reached his stardom. He was not discouraged in spite of being neglected and unappreciated by the senior chemists during his younger years. Because of his drive, he then reached the pedestal.
Connections
Svante was married twice, first to his former pupil Sofia Rudbeck (1894 to 1896), with whom he had one son Olof Arrhenius, and then to Maria Johansson (1905 to 1927). She was the sister of Johan Erik Johansson, professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institute and a close friend of Arrhenius. Three children were born of this marriage.
Svante August Arrhenius was a recipient of the 1903 Nobel Prize in chemistry, "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation."
Svante August Arrhenius was a recipient of the 1903 Nobel Prize in chemistry, "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation."
In 1902 Arrhenius was awarded the Davy Medal issued by the Royal Society of London "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry".
In 1902 Arrhenius was awarded the Davy Medal issued by the Royal Society of London "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry".
Faraday Lectureship Prize,
United Kingdom
In 1914 Arrhenius was awarded the Faraday Lectureship Prize, which issues once every three years (approximately) by the Royal Society of Chemistry for "exceptional contributions to physical or theoretical chemistry".
In 1914 Arrhenius was awarded the Faraday Lectureship Prize, which issues once every three years (approximately) by the Royal Society of Chemistry for "exceptional contributions to physical or theoretical chemistry".