Beckman, Arnold

Beckman, Arnold Orville — (April 10,1900, Cullom, Illinois, USA - May 18, 2004, La Jolla, California, USA) Earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Illinois. Received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1928. He founded what eventually became Beckman Instruments in 1935 with the invention of the acidimeter which was later called a -> pH meter. Beckman developed also the UV-VIS (1940) and IR spectrophotometers (1942) and the Helipot (helical potentiometer) (1940) as well as a dosimeter (1942). 

Several dozen meters were constructed at the California Institute of Technology before the summer of 1942. Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, 11 West State Street, Pasadena 2, California, who then took over the production of the meter, has manufactured several hundred. Descriptions of the various models will be published elsewhere. Some recording models- of the instrument are available. 

A. G. Myers and P. S. Dragovich, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Laboratories of Chemical Synthesis, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125... 

Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering 100 Academy, Irvine, CA Monday-Wednesday, January 14-16, 2002... 

The submitters acknowledge financial support provided by the National Science Loundation and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. 

So little current flows across a glass electrode that it was not practical when discovered in 1906. One of the first people to use a vacuum tube amplifier to measure pH with a glass electrode was an undergraduate, W. H. Wright at the University of Illinois in 1928, who knew about electronics from amateur radio. Arnold Beckman at Caltech invented a portable, rugged, vacuum tube pH meter In 1935, which revolutionized chemical instrumentation.16... 

Work in the author s laboratory is supported by grants from the NIH, the NSF, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the John Merck Fund, and the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. 

In contrast is the hugely successful American firm of Beckman Instruments, which constructed and marketed pH meters from 1935 and the DU Spectrophotometer from 1941. Papers of a biographical nature based on interviews with Arnold Beckman have been published.104,105 The development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers by the firm of Varian is considered in another paper, with emphasis on the introduction of the Varian A-60, the first commercial instrument intended for the broadly trained chemist as opposed to the custom-built tools for the research specialist.106... 

A. Thackray and M. Myers, Jnr., Arnold O. Beckman One Hundred Years of Excellence, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, 2000. 

A. Thackray and J. L. Sturchio, The education of an entrepreneur the early career of Arnold Beckman , in The Beckman Symposium on Biomedical Instrumentation, ed. C. M. Moberg, The Rockefeller University, New York, 1986, pp. 3-17. 

Meanwhile, Arnold Beckman (b.1900), hitherto a manufacturer of electronic pH meters, had joined forces with Robert Brattain - the brother of Walter Brattain of transistor fame - at Shell Research, with the encouragement of the U. S. Government s Rubber Reserve Company. Beckman s first commercial infrared spectrometer, the IR-1, was developed in 1942 and was used by the wartime synthetic rubber research program. However, the classified nature of this and similar work meant that Beckman spectrometers were not generally available until 1945, when the IR-2 was marketed. Meanwhile, in Britain, Adam Hilger and Grubb Parsons independ-... 

Acknowledgements Figure 11 was adopted from a version prepared by Alex Dunn. We thank him and others in the Caltech molecular wires group (Ivan Dmochowski, Jon Wilker, Corinna Hess, Wendy Belliston-Bittner, Nick Halpern-Manners) for contributions that are summarized in this chapter. Our work is supported by NIH, NSF, the Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar Award in Aging (to HBG), and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. 

A writing meeting was held on March 14-16, 2005, at the National Academies Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center, Irvine, California, and chaired by John Baross (University of Washington), with presentations from Steven Benner (Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution), William Baines (Rufus Scientific), and Jonathan Lunine (University of Arizona). 

We thank A. Kuki and R. A. Marcus for preprints of references 13 and 43, respectively. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. 

The research is supported by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus foundation, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation and the lU-STARS (Indiana University Science, Technology And Research Scholars) program. 

Klotz DM, Beckman BS, HiU SM, McLachlan JA, Walters MR, Arnold SF (1996) Environ Health Perspect 104 1084... 

Harry B, Gray (on the left-hand side) studied inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (1957-60) and at the University of Copenhagen (1960-61) before joining the chemistry faculty of Columbia University, New York. In 1966 he moved to Caltech where he is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Beckman Institute. His research interests include inorganic spectroscopy and photochemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, and electron transfer in proteins. Jay R. Winkler (on the right-hand side) received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1984. After a stay at the Brook haven National Laboratory he moved back to Caltech in 1990 where he is now Director of the Laser Resource Center and a Member of the Beckman Institute. 

Dubowski KM. Proceedings of the 1987 Arnold O Beckman Conference. Clin Chem 1987 33 5B-112B. 

The top managers at SmithKline possessed little understanding of the technological capabilities and needs of their acquisitions. Unlike the leaders at Abbott, they were not forced to learn by saving a business in crisis. In 1984 they sensibly sold off Beckman s industrial products for 165 million in cash to General Electric. But the output, quality, and profits from Beckman s instruments and the ophthalmic devices it had acquired continued to decline. By 1988 Arnold Beckman was publicly regretting the disintegration of his former company s capabilities. 

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