Victor Goldschmidt was a Norwegian mineralogist and geochemist. He is considered to be the founder of modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry, developer of the Classification of elements.
Background
Goldschmidt was born in Zürich. His Jewish parents, Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt and Amelie Koehne named their son after a colleague of Heinrich, Victor Meyer. There was a history of great scientists and philosophers in both families. The Goldschmidt family came to Norway 1901 when Heinrich Goldschmidt took over a chair as Professor of Chemistry in Kristiania.
Education
Victor was educated in Heidelberg and at the University of Christiania (now Oslo,) where he studied chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. In 1905 he became a Norwegian citizen. Goldschmidt received his doctorate at the age of 23 years old in 1911 in Southern Norway.
Career
In 1912 Goldschmidt undertook petrological studies in regional metamorphism as the first stage of his scientific career. His reports Geologisch-petrographische Studien, were published in five volumes between 1912 and 1921.
Goldschmidt was an instructor at the University of Christiania for two years before being appointed, at the age of twenty-six, professor and director of the Mineralogical institute, in 1914.
In 1917 Victor became chairman of the Norwegian government Commission for Raw Materials and director of the Raw Materials Laboratory, where he devoted himself to the practical utilization of science for the benefit of society. In the second phase of his career he carried out investigations into the factors governing the distribution of chemical species in nature.
In 1929 Goldschmidt was appointed professor at the University of Gottingen’s Faculty of Natural Sciences and was made head of the Mineralogical Institute. Here he built a model of the earth, predicting the structural distribution of different elements in the earth’s crust and atmosphere and classifying the natures and distributions of the various elements concerned.
In 1935 he resigned his chair in Gottingen as a result of Nazi policies and returned to a similar position in Oslo where he continued his studies of cosmic and terrestrial chemical distribution and isotopic geology. In the practical sphere he concentrated on the use and development of olivine rock in industrial refractories, the production of aluminum from silicates, the formation of mineral pigments, and the use of biotite as a fertilizer.
In 1937 Victor became chairman of the Norwegian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the World War II, after the Nazi invsion of Norway in 1940, he was hounded by the Germans and twice arrested, but in 1942 succeeded in escaping to Sweden and from there to England. He joined the staff of the Macaulay Institute of Soil Research in Aberdeen, and then the Rothamsted Experimental Station at Harpenden, where he continued his work on atomic energy. After the war he returned to Oslo.
Membership
Goldschmidt was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.