Willard Frank Libby was an American physical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 for developing the technique of radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating, a process that proved to be extremely beneficial in the field of palaeontology and archaeology. He is also noted for his contribution in the development of the atomic bomb while his association with the Manhattan Project (1941–45).
Background
Willard Frank Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado, on December 17, 1908, the son of farmers Ora Edward Libby and his wife Eva May (née Rivers). He had two brothers, Elmer and Raymond, and two sisters, Eva and Evelyn. His parents were farmers. His parents lived on his father's farm near Grand Valley and then, in 1913, when Willard was five, they moved to California.
Education
He attended elementary and high school in Sebastopol, California. In 1926 Libby graduated from high school, and the following year he entered the University of California at Berkeley. Libby was interested in English history and literature, but he decided on a more practical career and enrolled as a mining engineer at Berkeley. He received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry there in 1931, a Ph. D. in 1933. After receiving his BS degree in 1931, he continued his university work at Berkeley, studying under physical chemists Gilbert Newton Lewis, dean and chairman of the College of Chemistry, and Wendell M. Latimer.
As a graduate student, Libby built his first Geiger-Müller tube and improved it to detect minute amounts of radioactivity, including elements not theretofore believed to be radioactive, such as the lanthanide element, samarium.
Willard Libby was appointed instructor of the University of California at Berkeley, where he became assistant professor in 1938, and taught physical chemistry there until World War II.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1941 and elected to work at Princeton University, but on 8th December, 1941, this Fellowship was interrupted for war work on America's entry into World War II, and Libby went to Columbia University on the Manhattan District Project, on leave from the Department of Chemistry, California University, till 1945.
When the United States entered World War II, Libby volunteered his services and was transferred to the Columbia University War Research Division, where he took part in the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Libby was part of a group working on the separation of uranium isotopes by gaseous diffusion. He worked on isotope separation by the gaseous-diffusion method, and his ideas on radiocarbon dating remained embryonic.
In 1945 he moved to the Enrico Fermi Institute of Nuclear Studies, Chicago, and began an extensive study of radiocarbon.
The former, only recently out of the biosphere, had a measurably higher activity.
These measurements were made on borrowed equipment by an expensive technique known as isotope enrichment, so Libby decided to devise a simpler method using more sensitive apparatus.
The problem was solved by surrounding the counting equipment containing the sample with counters which switched off the central counter whenever an interfering particle (muon) arrived. With this refined apparatus Libby, with E. C. Anderson, made radiocarbon dating a practical possibility. For this work Libby received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1960.
From 1954 until 1959 Libby was research associate in the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute and simultaneously served on the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He was AEC spokesman in 1956 in the attempt to counter widespread concern over the danger of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests.
In addition to his work on radiocarbon he applied similar considerations to tritium; thus he showed that water remains about nine days in the atmosphere between evaporation and precipitation.
Libby remained at the University of California as the Director of the Institute of Geophysics until his retirement in 1976, but continued his teaching and research activities part-time.
Libby retired in 1976 and died at age seventy-one from the complications of pneumonia. He was cremated.
Libby served as Atomic Energy commissioner and advocated the use of fallout shelters and other measures to counter the perceived nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. His political stance as a “cold warrior” was controversial.
Views
Libby believed that traces of carbon-14 should always occur in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and that because carbon dioxide is continuously being incorporated into plant tissues during photosynthesis, plants should also contain traces of carbon-14. Because animal life depends on plant life, animals should also contain traces of carbon-14. After an organism died, no additional carbon-14 would be incorporated into its tissues, and that which was already present would begin to decay at a constant rate. Kamen had found its half-life to be 5,730 years—a short time compared to the age of Earth but long enough for an equilibrium to be established between the production and decay of carbon-14. According to West-green, “it should be possible, by measuring the remaining activity, to determine the time elapsed since death, if this occurred during the period between approximately 500 and 30,000 years ago.”
Quotations:
When asked what the most difficult and critical part of the work was, Libby stated: “Being smart enough to keep it secret until it was in hand... I don’t care who you are. You couldn’t get anyone to support it. It’s obviously too crazy.”
"In general, the samples may have to be inspected with some care under a relatively high-powered glass and then treated with properly chosen chemicals. But all of these things can be done and with techniques that are no more difficult than those used by the average hospital technician, and a sample can be obtained which should give authentic radiocarbon dates. The dating technique is one which requires care, but which can be carried out by adequately trained personnel who are sufficiently serious-minded about it. It is something like the discipline of surgery—cleanliness, care, seriousness, and practice. With these things it is possible to obtain radiocarbon dates which are consistent and which may indeed help roll back the pages of history and reveal to mankind something more about his ancestors, and in this way perhaps about his future."
Membership
Professor Libby holds memberships of numerous learned societies in the United States; he is also Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, of the Bolivian Society of Anthropology, and is Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1960).
Personality
In high school he played tackle and was called Wild Bill, a nickname that followed him all his life.
Physical Characteristics:
A tall youth who would eventually grow to six feet, three inches, Willard developed his legendary strength by working on the farm.
Quotes from others about the person
"The idea you had 13 years ago of trying to determine the age of biological materials by measuring their C-14 activity was a brilliant impulse. Thanks to your great experimental skill, acquired during many years devoted to the study of weakly radioactive substances, you have succeeded in developing a method that is indispensible [sic] for research work in many fields and in many institutes throughout the world. Archaeologists, geologists, geophysicists, and other scientists are greatly indebted to you for the valuable support you have given them in their work."
A scientist who had nominated Libby for the prize characterized his work as follows: “Seldom has a single discovery in chemistry had such an impact on the thinking in so many fields of human endeavour. Seldom has a single discovery generated such wide public interest” (Westgren, 1964, pp. 591–592).
His second wife, Leona Marshall Libby, noted that he “did not tell anyone of his final goal of proving [that] radiocarbon dating would be able to reveal the history of civilization because he felt that if he talked about such a crazy idea he would be labeled a crackpot and would not be able to get money to fund his research nor [sic] students to help him.”
Connections
In 1940, Libby married Leonor Hickey, a physical education teacher. They had twin daughters, who were born in 1945.
In 1966 he divorced Leonor and married Leona Woods Marshall, a distinguished nuclear physicist who was one of the original builders of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor. She joined him at UCLA as a professor of environmental engineering in 1973. Through this second marriage he acquired two stepsons, the children of her first marriage.