Intermediate and complex ions. V. The solubility product and activity of the ions in bi-valent salt ..
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
William Draper Harkins was an American nuclear physicist, chemist, scientist, and educator. He served as a professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, and also investigated nuclear chemistry, particularly the structure of the nucleus, and became the first scientist to reveal the basic process of nuclear fusion.
Background
William Draper Harkins was born on December 28, 1873 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Nelson Goodrich Harkins and Sarah Eliza Draper. He grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields that his father helped to pioneer, then, when he was nineteen, moved to Escondido, California.
Education
Harkins graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry in 1900.
He received a Ph. D. from Stanford in 1907 and did postdoctoral research with Fritz Haber at the Technical University of Karlsruhe (1909) and with A. A. Noyes and G. N. Lewis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1909-1910).
Career
For twelve years Harkins was a professor and chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Montana. In 1912, at the age of 39, Harkins was appointed assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, the late beginning of an extraordinarily creative and productive thirty-nine-year career at Chicago. He became a full professor in 1917 and Andrew MacLeish distinguished service professor in 1935.
Harkins' first research project, carried out for the Anaconda Farmers' Association in Montana, concerned arsenic pollution by smelter smoke from the Anaconda Copper Company. Decades before environmental concerns became popular, Harkins published his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1907-1908. Characteristically, the work was so thorough and so clearly presented that the company took immediate action to reduce pollution, especially after Harkins' results indicated that the process would pay for itself through sales of the arsenic removed from smelter smoke.
For fifteen years (1913-1928) Harkins and his students were the only Americans involved in studies of nuclear reactions and nuclear research. In 1915 Harkins and E. D. Wilson published the first five American papers on nuclear synthesis reactions, showing how the stability and abundance of the elements in stars could be predicted from the relative loss of mass in the fusion reactions of atom-building. Using Einstein's E = mc2 to determine the energy released as a criterion of stability, Harkins showed why nuclei with even mass numbers are the more abundant, and nuclei with mass numbers divisible by four are most abundant. Deviations of atomic masses from predictions of this theory were considered evidence for isotopes not yet observed, so Harkins and his students studied isotopic separations of chlorine and mercury by diffusion, in competition with mass spectrometric separations done by Francis Aston at Cambridge.
In early 1920 Aston reported chlorine-35 and chlorine-37, while Harkins reported masses of 35, 37, and 39; Aston later confirmed the chlorine-39. Harkins' experimental studies of nuclear reactions included pioneering studies with Wilson cloud chambers in the early 1920s and construction and operation (with M. D. Kamen, who later made the first carbon-14 with S. Rubin) of a cyclotron in the mid-1930s.
One of Harkins' major contributions was a detailed demonstration that, contrary to the view of James Chadwick and Ernest Rutherford, in neutron bombardment reactions the first step in neutron capture is the formation of an "excited nucleus" of measurable lifetime, which subsequently splits into fragments. Although he and his students published eighty papers on nuclear reactions, Harkins' major field of research was the physical chemistry of liquid and solid surfaces, a study started with Fritz Haber in 1909. Shocked at the inaccuracies of laboratory techniques for the measurement of surface tension, Harkins and his students developed accurate procedures that have become standard methods.
In 1917 Harkins published two papers on precisely measured surface tensions and interfacial tensions (against water) for 338 organic compounds, citing evidence for orientation of organic molecules in contact with water. A month later Irving Langmuir published a significant paper on orientation of insoluble monomolecular films on water, and the resulting competition influenced Harkins' research for years. He developed more precise methods for measuring insoluble films on water, and pursued studies of adsorption at surfaces from vapors and from solutions. With G. E. Boyd and George Jura he made important and novel use of calorimetric measurements with powdered solids; this work included development of the Harkins-Jura absolute method of measuring surface area of powders and procedures for measuring the "equilibrium spreading pressures" of vapors on solids.
Although he was sixty-eight when the United States entered World War II, Harkins became more active than ever. He was a member of the National Defense Research Committee throughout the war. After his cyclotron was turned over to the Manhattan Project, he plunged into a new problem, the emulsion polymerization of synthetic rubber. With M. L. Corrin and H. B. Klevens he made important quantitative studies of micelles in detergent solutions, findings that dominated research on emulsion polymerization for many years. Harkins published a third of his works after he was sixty-five, including nine research papers in the last fourteen months of his life. He died in Chicago in 1873.
Harkins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1921.
Personality
Harkins was a meticulous and resourceful experimenter, as well as an enterprising one, who did not hesitate to enter new fields and use new techniques.
Connections
On June 9, 1904, Harkins married Anna Louise Hatheway, head of the university's English department; they had two children.