Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes

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. 

In 1919, he resumed his position as assistant in the Berlin Institute and, in 1920, obtained his Habilitation with a thesis on the ring-chain tautomer-ism of y- and 5-hydroxyaldehydes. In 1922, Helferich was called to the position of Departmental Head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fibre Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. However, he never actually occupied this position, for, in the autumn of that year, he accepted a personal chair in organic chemistry at the University of Frankfurt in the Institute headed by Julius von Braun. 

Although the imperial government wanted scientists to help Germany become economically competitive, it did not want to finance institutes. In fact, a few days before the inauguration of the first Kaiser Wilhelm Society institute, it was still unfunded. At the last minute, Leopold Koppel, chair of the German Gaslight Company, offered to finance a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry with two conditions the Kaiser must thank him publicly, and Fritz Haber must be the institute s director. 

Haber was slow to grasp the implications of the Nazis rise to power. As Germans boycotted Jewish businesses and Hitler s brownshirts removed Jewish students from university libraries and laboratories, the Nazis passed a law on April 7, 1933, to cleanse the civil service and universities of Jews. By this time, Haber s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was financed by the government and its employees were treated as civil functionaries subject to the new law. Haber himself was exempt because of war work and seniority. Eager for a chemical warfare center, Nazi authorities singled out Haber s institute and ordered him to fire its Jews. At the same time, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society told Haber to somehow keep his important senior scientists. He had until May 2 to act. 

Alan D. Beyerchen. On the Stimulation of Excellence in Wilhelmian Science. In Another Germany A Reconsideration of the Imperial Era, Joachim Remak and Jack Dukes, eds. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1988, pp. 139-168. Source for role of technical schools chemical companies employ more chemists than universities funding of Kaiser Wilhelm institutes and Memorial Service only protest. 

Jeffrey Allan Johnson. The Kaiser s Chemists Science and Modernization in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill, NC The University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Source for German professorate cold war atmosphere Boer war fight with Nernst and Jewish participation in Kaiser Wilhelm institutes. 

Kaiser Wilhelm Society. History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. hl lp //www. fhi-berlin.mpg.de/history/found.html. Source for fact that Nazis politicized Haber s institute most of all society institutes. 

A second and greater opportunity came his way in the spring of 1922. Professor Fritz Haber, discoverer of the Haber ammonia synthesis process and head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry (now known as the Max Planck Institute), contacted Professor Schlenk. 

Professor Fritz Haber, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, no doubt had this in mind when he called Mark to his villa during the summer of 1926. In a visit reminscent of Haber and Schlenk s meeting which brought Mark to the Institute a few years before, Haber outlined Mark s achievements and described a new opportunity for advancement, this time in the chemical industry. The position was as an Assistant Director of Research under Kurt H. Meyer with the giant I.G. Farbenindustrie. 

Most of Mark s work done during this period was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of the Chemistry of Fibers or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Berlin-Dahlen. His collaborators during this six-year period... 

When Mark accepted a position at the University of Vienna in 1932 he was at last formally answering the call of teaching. From the time he left Vienna in 1921 until his return, the years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and I. G. Farben, he remained interested and in close contact with the education programs of young scientists. At Ludwigschafen for example, he was simultaneously an industrial scientist and manager, and an Associate Professor at the technische hochschule at Karlsruhe. 

As we have discussed in the preceeding chapters, Mark rose rapidly to positions of high responsibility at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and I.G. Farben. A young, gregarious leader among the autocratic leaders of German science and industry, he developed a style which was unique at that time and place. 

What were the reasons for the hesitant progress of modern genetics in Germany after World War II The reconstruction of the Max Planck Society (MPS) on the ruins of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes reflects the development of research and technology in general and of molecular genetics in particular, in relation to public and political support. 

Professor Hahn is a native of Frankfort-on-the Main. He collaborated with Sir William Ramsay, and later with Miss Lise Meitner, and in 1944 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on atomic fission. He is a member of the German Atomic Weight Commission and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. Miss Meitner, who was also on the staff of this Institute, is a native of Vienna. 

Michael Polanyi, Hungarian-British chemist, economist, and philosopher. Bom Budapest 1891. Doctor of medicine 1913, Ph.D. University of Budapest, 1917. Researcher Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, Berlin, 1920-1933. Professor of chemistry, Manchester, 1933-1948 of social studies, Manchester, 1948-1958. Professor Oxford, 1958-1976. Best known for book Personal Knowledge , 1958. Died Northampton, England, 1976. 

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 . 

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