Raymond Matthew Fuoss

Raymond Fuoss was a 20 century polymath who spoke 19 languages fluently. He entered Harvard at 17 and had published extensively by the time he graduated in 1925. He was a Sheldon Fellow at the University of Munich and worked with Wieland, Fajans and Lange. Eventually he entered Brown University to work with Charles A. Kraus, the famous electrochemist and ACS President. He graduated in 2 years after writing his actual thesis with Lars Onsager on irreversible processes in non-aqueous solvents. He remained at Brown until 1935 when the General Electric Company made him an offer he could not refuse. 

Fuoss was one of the most educated chemists in America, and he applied both his knowledge and his brilliant theoretical mind to the problem of the electrical properties of polymers. He established the paradigms that still undergird research in this area. He was chosen to speak at the Western Reserve Lectures in 1942 on this topic [2] (Fig. 5.2). 

Once the war was over in 1945, Fuoss accepted the Sterling Chair in Chemistry at Yale. The team of Onsager, Kirkwood and Fuoss made Yale the premier theoretical chemistry department in the world at this time. The focus of his work at Yale was on electrolyte solutions, polyelectrolytes and the statistical mechanics of condensed phase systems. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1951. While his interests continued to evolve after this period in directions different than the community of polymer scientists, his contribution to the period of the consolidation of the basic paradigms was seminal. The unique phenomena associated with linear polyelectrolytes stimulated much theoretical activity, both in the time of Fuoss and afterward. It remains a challenging, but rewarding, topic today. 

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