Dahlem Physical Chemistry

Haber s Institute was located in the prosperous Berlin suburb of Dahlem in a campus—like setting together with other K. W. institutes devoted to biochemistry, inorganic chemistry, silicate and fiber research. It was one of the most famous and most generously endowed research centers in the world. The Institute had modern equipment, workshops, a library, access to a luxurious clubhouse and even two tennis courts. It served as the focal point for seminars and meetings on physical chemistry in which Fritz Haber, the winner of the 1918 Nobel prize was the undisputed leader. 

In 1915, Haber joined the gas warfare experiments of the army, and in 1916, assumed technical responsibility for gas warfare in the War Ministry s Chemical Department, which he led. The KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, which employed 2,150 people by the end of the war, was responsible for carrying out chemical weapons experiments. See Michael Engel, Geschichte Dahlems (Berlin Verlag A. Spitz, 984), 135 f.. Cf. ... im Frieden der Menschheit, im Kriege dem Vaterlande... 

The very cruel chemical war later showed that Duisberg was wrong, and it was Fritz Haber who was responsible for this development. Haber became the main representative of the chemical war in Germany. His Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Ber-lin-Dahlem became the main research and development center involved in finding and testing chemicals for this kind of war. His first important action was to use chlorine for a poison gas attack in Flanders. The prospects for use of chlorine seemed favourable because in the years before the war the industrial use of chlorine had been extended by the possibility of filling steel cylinders by compression. 

Fritz Haber (Breslau, 9 December 1868-Basel, 29 January 1934) studied in Berlin, Heidelberg and Charlottenberg, and worked at first on organic chemistry. In 1894 he became assistant to Bunte at the Technical High School at Karlsruhe, where he became associate professor (1898) and (1906) professor of technical chemistry. Whilst at Karlsruhe he investigated the synthesis of ammonia from its elements (1905, 1915) which afterwards (with the collaboration of Carl Bosch) led to the development of the manufacture of synthetic ammonia by the Badische Co. at Ludwigshafen, although the reaction under pressure (the technical process) was first carried out by Nernst (see above). In 1911 Haber became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem. He received the Nobel Prize in 1919. He worked on chemical equilibria in flames (1895 f.), the electrolytic reduction of nitrobenzene (1898 f.), autoxidation (1900 f.), the synthesis of nitric oxide in the electric arc (1908 f.), and on many branches of electrochemistry. His books contain useful material, the one on thermodynamics an unsuccessful approach to the Nernst heat theorem. 

Z. phys. Chem.y 1906, Ivii, 385-470 1907, Ixi, 249 Koll. Z., 1907, i, 321. Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich (Charlottenburg, 28 January 1880-Minneapolis, U.S.A., 30 March 1941), professor of physical chemistry in the Technical High-School, Brunswick (1911), member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, Dahlem (Berlin) (1919) Donnan, Obit. Not. F.R.S., 1942-4, iv,... 

Invited by Walther Kossel, in 1941 Ivan Stranski left Bulgaria for Germany and worked firstly at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and then at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fiir Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Berlin-Dahlem (now Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaff). In 1945 Stranski was elected director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Technische Hochschule (now Technische Universitdt) of Berlin and was a rector and a vice rector of this University during the period 1951-1953. In 1953 he joined the Freie Universitdt of Berlin and worked there till 1963, and in 1954 he became also a deputy director of the Fritz-Haber-Institut. 

Haber s official appointment as director of the newly-founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Eiectrochemistry and his reiease from his post in Karisruhe would not be finalized until June of 1911 nevertheless, he rapidly became engrossed in the construction of the Berlin institute. In the months preceding his permanent move to Dahlem, Haber commuted frequentiy between Karisruhe, where he still had teaching duties, and Berlin. Whiie in Beriin, Haber not oniy offered input on architectural plans for the new Institute but aiso had a hand in drafting its charter and made suggestions concerning its future operation. So far as the charter was concerned, Haber aimed to ensure, in his own words ... 

Fig. 1.7. Dahlem near the end of 1918 in the foreground the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Chemistry (left) and Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (right) in the background the KWI for Biology, opened in 1915.

When building up the Institute in Dahlem, Haber made limited use of the advantages offered by the Berlin physical chemistry community. Van t Hoff died the year Haber arrived in Berlin, while Haber and Nemst had previously engaged in a heated dispute concerning the thermodynamics of ammonia synthesis and were not close personally. Moreover, Haber brought most of the initial Institute staff with him from Karlsruhe. 

After receiving her doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna, Meitner joined the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Dahlem, in 1907, where she collaborated with Hahn. In 1917, they were one of three teams of researchers that independently discovered the element protactinium (Pa, atomic number 91). Their collaboration in the field of radiochemistry continued until 1938, when the German annexation of Austria made it difficult for Meimer, who was bom into a Jewish family although she later converted to Christianity, to continue working in Nazi Germany. She immigrated to Sweden, where she got some space but little other support at Manne Siegbold s institute in Stockholm. 

Wliile continuing work with Flahn at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, beginning in 1912 Meitner served as assistant to Max Planck at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin, and in 1918 was appointed head of the physics department at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. 

Most scientists involved in radioactive research had a background in chemistry or physics, and up to World War I little distinction was made between the physical and chemical aspects of radioactive research. As Ruth Sime points out, radioactivity split after the war. In 1917, to give an example, the radioactive section at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fur Chemie in Berlin-Dahlem split into a physical section (headed by Meitner) and a chemical section (headed by Hahn). In some sense, however, the field retained its unity radiochemistry was kept much alive at the Institut du Radium in Paris, and this expertise helped in the discovery of artificial radioactivity, when phosphorus had to be isolated in three minutes. The subdisciplinary divide was informed by a common interest in radioactive substances. This division did not so much reflect the independence of radiophysics and radiochemistry, as the mutual confidence of their practitioners. As Sime puts it Physicists and chemists collaborated across a pronounced disciplinary divide... they trusted each other s expertise without always understanding each other s limitations . 

Mark, Polanyi s colleague in the Institute for Fiber Chemistry, interested himself in the work on adsorption and its implications for catalysis, later recalling that most organic chemists found Polanyi s theory perfectly satisfactory, but that they were not much interested in electrons or the new physics. Scott, Michael Polanyi s creativity in chemistry, 284 also see Hermann Mark, Recollections of Dahlem and Lud-wigshafen, in Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, 603-607, on 603. 

Arnold F., Physics and chemistry of atmospheric ions. Proc. Dahlem Workshop on Atmospheric Chemistry. Ed. E.D. Goldberg, 273-300 (1982). 

Debye returned to Zurich in 1920 as professor of physics and principal of the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, and seven years later he held the same post at Leipzig. From 1934 to 1939 he was director of the Max Planck Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin-Dahlem and professor of physics at the University of Berlin. During this period he was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases. ... 

National Institute of Materials Physics, Bucharest, frunza alphal. infim.ro, Romania Institute of Applied Chemistry, Berlin-Adlershof, Germany Bundesanstalt fur Materialforschung und Priifung, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany... 

He traveled again to Princeton to see Einstein. They worked up another letter and sent it under Einstein s signature to Sachs. It emphasized the secret German uranium research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, about which they had learned from the physical chemist Peter Debye, the 1936 Nobel laureate in chemistry and director of the physics institute at Dahlem, who had been expelled recently to the United States, ostensibly... 

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