Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry

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... 

In September of 1920, Polanyi took a position in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry, which was housed in the buildings of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry directed by Fritz Haber. [8] By this time Polanyi had published his doctoral thesis and papers in several areas of thermodynamics, including papers on Nernst s heat theorem and Einstein s quantum theory for specific heats. [9] In the next 13 years, before he was forced to leave Germany in 1933, Polanyi worked in several areas of physical chemistry in Berlin, afterwards heading Manchester s physical chemistry laboratory for fifteen years. In 1948 Polanyi exchanged his professorship in chemistry at Manchester for a chair in social studies, thus formally becoming a philosopher. 

In the fall of 1928, I came to Berlin to start my Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. I was accepted as a doctoral student at the recommendation of my brother Ladislas who was then private assistant to Fritz Haber, the director of the Institute and a coworker of Dr. Bonhoeffer. 

Dr. Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. ... 

Hahn followed Haber to work on gas warfare. So did the physicist James Franck, head of the physics department at Haber s institute, who, like Haber and Hahn, would later win the Nobel Prize. So did a crowd of industrial chemists employed by I.G. Farben, a cartel of eight chemical companies assembled in wartime by the energetic Carl Duisberg of Bayer. The plant at Leverkusen with the new lecture hall turned up hundreds of known toxic substances, many of them dye precursors and intermediates, and sent them off to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry for study. Berlin acquired depots for gas storage and a school where Hahn instructed in gas defense. 

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. 

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry... 

Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer and Arnold Eucken, met similar resistance. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Defense wanted application-oriented, military research to continue at the Institute until an appropriate military institute could be established. Hence, as far as the two Ministries were concerned, Thiessen was a far more suitable Director than the lauded scientists proposed by the KWG. While this debate unfolded between the ministries and the KWG, Thiessen was promoted to an academic post adequate for a KWG director. After he had failed to find a position in Freiburg or Frankfurt, Thiessen was offered the post of Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Chemistry Institute at Munster in March of 1935, succeeding Rudolf Schenck. Though his appointment was confirmed by the Ministry of Education on 1 April 1935, Thiessen never occupied the post. On 20 May 1935 the Ministry of Education named Thiessen Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, as well as Professor for Physical Chemistry at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In the minutes of the Institute s board meeting a month later, Planck noted that the naming of the new Institute Director had come about in an unusual manner nevertheless, he accepted the political imposition and expressed his desire to work together with Thiessen. 

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry was established in 1911 as one of the first two institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG). Its successor, the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI), is not only one of the oldest and most tradition rich institutes of the Max Planck Society (MPG), but also one of the most distinguished, with the highest number of affiliated Nobel Laureates of any KWG/MPG institute. These include Fritz Haber, the founding director, the later directors Max von Laue, Ernst Ruska and Gerhard Ertl, and several scientists who served at the Institute in lesser capacities, such as James Franck, Eugene Wigner and Heinrich Wieland. 

Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1925. In 1926 he habilitated for physical chemistry in Sofia, where he became extraordinary Professor in 1926, and full Professor in 1937. In 1930/31 he worked as a Rockefeller scholar at the TH Berlin, and in 1935/36 at the Technical Institute of the Ural in Sverdlovsk, USSR (now Ekaterinburg, Russia). He was Guest Professor in Breslau from 1941 to 1944 and then went to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin. From 1945 until 1963 he was Professor at the Technical University of Berlin (West-Berlin). Stranski made fundamental contributions to the theory of crystal growth and surface chemistry (see - Stranski-Krastanov heteroepitaxial metal deposition) and [ii]. 

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. 

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. 

In late 1915 or early 1916, Schmidt, a cousin of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, " ministerial director and later Prussian Kultusminister (Minister of Education), contacted Fritz Haber, whose Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (henceforth KWI) for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry had from late 1914 been converted into a centre for chemical warfare research. Schmidt proposed the creation of a foundation with an endowment of 250,000 marks to reward persons who have rendered a scientific or technical service to the war effort and who can use it . Schmidt envisaged that Captain Haber would manage the foundation and propose suitable individuals for honours. The documents do not show whether Schmidt was thinking of himself, but he did belong to the circle of possible candidates. He had developed a tear gas, as well as a method to produce artificial fog (so-called Hochst fog ), which was used in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916. 

However, osmium is a very rare resource and osmium oxide volatilize easily. Therefore, it was necessary to develop cheaper catalysts with excellent performances for ammonia synthesis. Since then, Haber identified that uranium is active for ammonia synthesis. However, in 1912, he was appointed as the director of Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, indicating the end of the research activity of Haber in the field of ammonia synthesis. Since then, Bosch and Mittasch became the principal researchers in BASF to continue the industrialization process for the ammonia synthesis. Bosch was the leader of the whole research group, and Mittasch became the main investigator for the exploration of catalysts. 

In the aftermath of WWII, Havemann was commissioned by the Soviets to administer the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. In addition he set up a laboratory at the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in which he resumed his research on colloids and dyes. As an overt Communist and opponent of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Havemann s simmering conflict with the West-Berlin authorities culminated in 1950, at the peak of the Cold War, in his dismissal. As a result, he relocated to the GDR, where he carried on with his research on proteins and photochemistry, as professor at Humboldt University and director of its Institute for Physical Chemistry. In addition to his research, he was also active politically, e.g. as dean of student affairs, pro-rector, and... 

In spite of this recognition and its early scientific successes, the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry still faced difficult conditions, as did all of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin. On one side loomed the possibility of the Allied Control Council dissolving the Kaiser Wilhelm Society on account of its ambivalent role in the Third Reich. On the other side, the Institute risked being sucked into struggles between multiple more-powerful interest groups, where it could... 

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.

It marked the opening of both the Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry and the adjacent Institute for Chemistry. Participants assembled in the library of the Chemistry Institute. The program was at his Majesty s request, as restricted [in scope] as possible. It included brief addresses from Emil Fischer, Adolf Harnack, Culture Minister August Trott zu Solz and, of course, his royal Majesty. Then came a tour of the Institutes with brief scientific talks and demonstrations. The presentations in the Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry Institute were supervised by the Director himself, and among other things, included a demonstration of ammonia synthesis, which was presented as a practical application of fundamental chemical principles. At the conclusion of the celebration members gathered in the machine hall of the Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry Institute for the first general assembly of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. 

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