Ostwald, William

In 1913, after a series of exchanges with Wilhelm Ostwald and William Ramsay, Ernest Solvay established another foundation, the Institut International de Chimie, which embraced activity relating to chemistry. The two foundations were ultimately united into Les Instituts Internationaux de Physique et de Chimie, each one having its own Scientific Committee. 

Thomson had tried to convince Davy of the value of the theory. But Davy was adamant m his opposition, and caricatured Dalton s theory so skilfully that many were astonished how any man of sense or science would be taken up with such a tissue of absurdities Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University, who began his career in the field of education as a teacher of chemistry, cautioned his students as late as 1868 that the existence of atoms is itself an hypothesis and not a probable one. All dogmatic assertion upon it is to be regarded with distrust." Berthollet, too, was so sceptical of the atomic theory that as late as 1890 he still wrote the formula for water as if it were hydrogen peroxide—to him atoms were but fabrications of the mind. Wilhelm Ostwald, who did not hesitate to champion the unorthodox theories of many young chemical dreamers, wanted as late as 1910 to do away completely with the atomic theory. 

Various theories have been advanced in explanation. Ostwald suggested that supersaturation took place, followed by precipitation, which cleared the immediate neighbourhood of the reactants, and it was therefore necessary for the silver nitrate to diffuse further before supersaturation was again reached. Hatsehek, however, shows that the periodic precipitation takes place in conditions which render supersaturation impossible. Williams and Mackenzie maintain that the silver chromate is precipitated according to the usual rules of the solubility product, and does not behave in any way as a protected colloid but as a crystalloid. More recent w ork suggests that whenever precipitation takes place, the precipitate first passes through the colloidal... 

Wilhelmy s work remained largely unnoticed until Ostwald drew attention to it over 30 years later. In the meantime, three pairs of workers had performed important work on reaction kinetics and chemical equilibria. They were the Frenchmen Berthelot and Leon Pean de Saint-Gilles (1832-1863), the Norwegians Cato Maximilian Guldberg (1836-1902) and Peter Waage (1833-1900), and the Englishmen Augustus Vernon Harcourt (1834-1919) and William Esson (1839-1916). 

William Ostwald points out the relevance of Grove s discovery in a discourse... 

The phenomena of ionic migration were first clearly stated and demonstrated experimentally by Wilhelm Hittorf (Bonn 27 March 1824-Munster, 28 November 1914), professor of physics and chemistry in Munster, Westphalia. He was elected an honorary member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1888, van t Hoff being elected in 1892 and Ostwald in 1894. He did important work on cathode rays (1869) and received the Hughes medal of the Royal Society in 1903, the President (Sir William Huggins) saying that Hittorf s first paper on the migration of the ions marks an epoch in our knowledge of electrolysis . ... 

William H. Walker (1869-1934) who brought to this discipline the respect it should enjoy within the engineering curriculum (12,13). After an M.S. in Chemistry at M.I.T. (1887) and a doctorate at the University of Leipzig with Ostwald (1890), Noyes established the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in 1903. William Walker, who had received his doctorate in 1892 at the University of Gottingen with Otto Wallach (Nobel Prize 1910), saw the importance of such a laboratory in chemical research and established in 1908 the Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry. 

The direct production of nitric oxide from air at high temperatures in an electric arc by the Birkeland and Eyde or Cyanamide processes was feasible, but could only be used in locations with abrmdant and cheap hydroelectric power. This clearly was not the long term answer, and a series of significant advances initiated by Ostwald at Leipzig, following discussions with William Pfeffer, soon followed. Ostwald, himself, worked on the catalytic synthesis of ammonia, and its oxidation to nitric acid. 

After investigating the electrochemical process first described by Sir William Grove in 1839, Ostwald in 1894 predicted that the twentieth century would become the Age of Electrochemical Combustion, with the replacement of steam Rankine cycle heat engines by much more efficient, pollution-free fuel cells (8. ... 

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