Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry

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. 

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. 

Late in 1938, in Berlin-Dahlem, an experimenter in nuclear chemistry touched off a wave of excitement throughout the world which even reached the front pages of the most conservative newspapers. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, only a few miles from Hitler s Chancellery, three researchers had proceeded to repeat some experiments first performed by Enrico Fermi in Rome in 1934. The Italian scientist, in an attempt to produce the Curies artificial radioactivity in the very heavy elements by bombarding them with neutrons, believed he had created an element (No. 93) even heavier than uranium. 

Other scientific leaders in Berlin had the same idea. They tried to persuade Willstatter to lead the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, next door to Haber s establishment, and Haber became the intermediary between them and Willstatter. During these discussions, friendship grew. Haber tried, with some awkwardness, to put his feelings into words. Seldom has it happened, at least as an adult, that I ve felt drawn toward affection for a professional colleague with whom I wasn t previously acquainted, Haber wrote on July 31, 1911. It s been even more rare that the other, of the same age, returns that affection. In your case I do sense this rare and fortunate event. ... 

Six months later Szilard wrote another paper in thermodynamics, On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings, that eventually would be recognized as one of the important foundation documents of modem information theory. By then he had his advanced degree he was Dr. Leo Szilard now. He experimented with X-ray effects in crystals, von Laue s field, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem until 1925 that year the University of Berlin accepted his entropy paper as his Habilitationsschrift, his inaugural dissertation, and he was thereupon appointed a Privatdozent, a position he held until he left for England in 1933. 

During the Great War she had volunteered as an X-ray technician with the Austrian Army there, says Frisch, she had to cope with streams of injured Polish soldiers, not understanding their language, and with her medical bosses who interfered with her work, not understanding X-rays. She arranged her leaves from duty to coincide with Otto Hahn s and hurried to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem to work with him that was when they identified the element next down from... 

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, another measure of burgeoning German power. 

It is significant that Perkin sold out to a German. In Europe a newly united Germany had resolved to secure self-sufficiency and its place in European and world economies. And it did so with the marriage of science and industry. In the 1910s the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry were endowed, and other institutes with a pragmatic focus were quickly established thereafter (such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research). The kaiser was motivated by the success he had already seen from the cooperation of German industrial and academic chemistry— based almost entirely on the success of textile dyes. 

It must be added here that, for example, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, conventional research on organic chemistry proceeded alongside new investigations on radium by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner Fritz Haber pursued right from the start innovative research in physical chemistry but all in all, the new institutes did not follow only new scientific ways. 

During the foundation period of these new institutes between 1917 and 1922, industrialists, scientists, and bureaucrats looked upon earlier Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (for chemistry, physical chemistry, coal research) as exemplars and hoped to achieve similiar success. Their perception was that the German chemical firms had been successful because they had internally elaborated research and development structures as well as research institutions within the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Moreover, the close... 

Organic Chemistry was appointed Director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin and his position as Professor at the Eidgenoessische Technisdi Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich became vacant. It is an impressive testimony to Staudinger s ability that this 31 year old chemist was selected as a successm to such a great man in preference to many much older contenders, each of which had already shown considerable capability and promise. 

Kabanox, V. 149 Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft 70 Kaiser Wilhelm Institut 146 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute 20 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry 96... 

Discovery Protactinium was identified by Fajans and Gohring in Karlsruhe in 1913, who named the new element brevium. They had discovered the isotope Pa with a half-life of 5.70 h. Lise Meitner at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin separated the oxide of a more long-lived isotope from pitchblende (mixed with tantalum oxide). She published the news in 1918 together with Otto Hahn. The new element was discovered independently in the same year by F. Soddy, J. A. Cranston and A. Fleck in Glasgow. The name protactinium was selected because it was recognized as the prototype for actinium. The element was first isolated by Aristid V. Crosse in 1934. He prepared 2 mg of the metal. 

It was a mystery that actinium exists in nature. Its most long-lived isotope, Ac, has a half-life of 22 years. It must have a long-lived precursor, from which it is continuously formed. Otto Hahn and Use Meitner, working at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Berlin, were aware of that and started an examination of the siliceous residues of pitchblende. While Otto Hahn was absent due to service in the army, in 1918 Lise Meitner succeeded, by utilizing tantalum pentoxide as a carrier, in detecting a long-lived alpha emitter that could be the mother of actinium. Although she had not separated the element itself, she (and Otto Hahn) had discovered the new element number 91. 

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.

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