Weizmann, Chaim

RUSSIAN-BORN BRITISH CHEMIST, PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL 1874-1952 

One of the few who have achieved success in two disparate fields, chemist and statesman Chaim Weizmann was bom on November 17, 1874, in the small town of Motol, Russia—part of what was known as the Pale of Settlement, an area where Jewish famihes were allowed to live. Beginning at age four he attended a religious school in which classes were conducted in Yiddish. (He did not learn Russian until he was eleven.) In 1885 he migrated to Pinsk to attend a Russian high school, where he studied chemistry and devoted much of his spare time to Zionist activities. He later became president of the World Zionist Organization (from 1921), president of the Hebrew University in Palestine (from 1932), and the first president, a largely ceremonial position, of the new State of Israel (from its establishment in 1948 until his death). 

After university studies in Germany and Switzerland (he earned a Ph.D. in 1899 for research on dyestuffs), he taught as a privatdocent (unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Geneva. He subsequently carried out basic and applied research at the University of Manchester in England. His academic research was supplemented by industrial research. In 1904 he was awarded the first of his 110 patents. He became a British citizen in 1910. 

Weizmann knew that his fermentation process yielded chemical compounds containing three and four carbon atoms and predicted that the same process could produce the substances on which modem petrochemical industries are based. He often enunciated the need for countries (especially those poor in natural oil) to replace a petroleum-based chemical industry with one based on fermentation. 

The Balfour Declaration (1917), the first formal international recognition of Zionism, was, to some extent, a culmination of Weizmann s scientific and political efforts. His fermentation process, which contributed to the Allies victory in World War I, was not a direct cause of the declaration but was certainly an indirect one. 

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Waters, William, 193 Watt, Charles, 45 Watts, Henry, 98, 101 Weber, Wilhelm, 45, 52 Weizmann, Chaim, 180, 180 n.75... 

Weizmann, Chaim (1949). Trial and Error The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. New York Harper. 

Weizmann, Chaim, 231 Welsbach, Auer von, 80 Wild, Wilhelm, 97, 102 Wilfarth, Hermann, 14-15 Willstatter, Richard, 103, 231 Winogradsky, Sergei Nikolaevich, 16-17 Wislicenus, Johannes, 86 Wohler, Friedrich, 6 Wolf, Hans, 94-95... 

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