Results for Svante Arrhenius
On this page:
 
Scientist:

Svante August Arrhenius

Swedish physical chemist (1859–1927)

Arrhenius was born in Wijk, near Uppsala, Sweden. He originally went to Uppsala University to study chemistry, changing later to physics. Finding the standard mediocre, he transferred to Stockholm in 1881 to do research under the physicist Erik Edlund, working initially on electrical polarization and then on the conductivity of solutions (electrolytes).

At the time it was known that solutions of certain compounds conduct electricity and that chemical reactions could occur when a current was passed. It was thought that the current decomposed the substance. In 1883 Arrhenius proposed a theory that substances were partly converted into an active form when dissolved. The active part was responsible for conductivity. In the case of acids and bases, he correlated the strength with the degree of decomposition on solution. This work was published as Recherches sur la conductibilité galvanique des electrolytes (1884; Researches on the Electrical Conductivity of Electrolytes) and submitted as his doctoral dissertation. The paper's great merit was not recognized by the Swedish authorities and he was awarded only a fourth-class doctorate. Arrhenius sent his work to several leading physical chemists, including Jacobus van't Hoff, Friedrich Ostwald, and Rudolf Clausius, who were immediately impressed. This led to a period of travel and work in various European laboratories in the period 1885–91.

In 1887 van't Hoff showed that although the gas law (pV = RT) could be applied to the osmotic pressure of solutions, certain solutions behaved as if there were more molecules than expected. Arrhenius at once realized that this was due to dissociation – a conclusion confirmed by further experimental work and published in the classic paper Über die Dissociation der in Wasser gelösten Stoffe (1887; On the Dissociation of Substances in Water). The idea that electrolytes were dissociated even without a current being passed proved difficult for many chemists but the theory has stood the test of time.

This work won Arrhenius a high international reputation but only limited acclaim in Sweden. Despite this he returned to Stockholm in 1891 as lecturer at the Technical Institute and in 1895 became professor there. In 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry and in 1905 he became the director of the Nobel Institute, a post he held until shortly before his death.

Arrhenius was a man of wide-ranging intellect and besides developing his work on solutions, in later life he worked on cosmogony and on serum therapy, being especially interested in the relation between toxins and antitoxins. He also investigated the greenhouse effect by which carbon dioxide regulates atmospheric temperature and calculated the changes that would have been necessary to have produced the Ice Ages.

 
 
Biography: Svante August Arrhenius

The Swedish chemist and physicist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) is known for his theory of electrolytic dissociation.

Svante Arrhenius was born on Feb. 19, 1859, at Vik near Uppsala, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. His father was a land surveyor and later a supervisor at the University of Uppsala.

Arrhenius's intellectual abilities became obvious early. Against his parents' wishes, the blond, blue-eyed, rubicund child taught himself to read at the age of 3. He acquired a fantastic arithmetical skill and a pictorial memory by observing his father adding columns in his account books. In his future scientific work, he was especially fond of discovering relationships and laws from masses of data. At the age of 8, he entered the fifth grade of the cathedral school, where he distinguished himself particularly in physics and mathematics and from which he graduated, the youngest and ablest student, in 1876.

Theory of Electrolytes

Arrhenius entered the University of Uppsala, where he studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics. As he was not satisfied with his chief instructor in physics, he left Uppsala in 1881 to work on the conductivities of electrolytes at Stockholm under the physicist E. Edlund. In 1884 Arrhenius presented his results (Recherches sur la conductibilité galvanique des électrolytes) together with a new theory of electrolytes (Théorie chimique des électrolytes) in a 150-page dissertation for the doctorate at Uppsala. Although he compromised and moderated his radical ideas, his professors were not impressed and only grudgingly passed the dissertation.

Arrhenius's theory of electrolytes encountered widespread resistance from the scientific world, but it eventually found confirmation in the modern theory of atomic structure. Of the 56 theses advanced in his 1884 dissertation, only a few have not withstood the test of time or have had to be greatly modified. In order to explain the nonconductance of solid salt and pure water when tested separately and the conductance of an aqueous salt solution, Arrhenius postulated that when a solid salt is dissolved in water its molecules dissociate or ionize into charged particles, which Michael Faraday had called ions years before. Whereas Faraday assumed that such ions are produced only during electrolysis, Arrhenius proposed that they are already present in solution even without the application of an electric current. Chemical reactions in solutions are thus reactions between ions. Arrhenius's views were essentially correct for weak electrolytes (weak acids, bases, and other covalent substances), but for strong electrolytes his ideas were modified in 1923 by the Debye-Hückel theory of inter-ionic attraction.

Professional Recognition

With the aid of a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Arrhenius devoted his next few years to travel and study. He worked with Wilhelm Ostwald in Riga and Leipzig, with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Würzburg, with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, and with J. H. van't Hoff in Amsterdam.

In 1891 Arrhenius was appointed lecturer and in 1895, over strong objections, professor of physics at the Technical University of Stockholm, of which he became rector in 1896. During this time he courted and married Sofia Rudback. The couple had a son, Olav Vilhelm, who became a worker in soil science and agricultural botany. Three children were born of his second marriage, to Maria Johansson.

In 1901 Arrhenius was elected, with strong opposition, to th Swedish Academy of Sciences. The following year he received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, and in 1903 he became the first Swede to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his theory of electrolytic dissociation. He was appointed rector of the newly founded Nobel Institute for Physical Research at Stockholm in 1905, a position he held until his retirement in the spring of 1927.

Spectrum of Scientific Achievement

After his theory was accepted by the entire scientific world, Arrhenius turned his attention to other topics. He became interested in the widest application of the fundamental theory of chemical reactions. In 1902 he began to apply the laws of theoretical chemistry to physiological problems, especially those of serum therapy (immunochemistry). He found that organismic changes follow the same laws as ordinary chemical reactions and that no essential difference exists between reactions in the test tube and those in the human body.

Arrhenius became active in the fields of astronomy and cosmic physics, and he proposed a new theory of the birth of the solar system by the collision of stars. He used the ability of radiation pressure to transport cosmic material to explain comets, the corona, the aurora borealis, and zodiacal light. He also hypothesized that spores of living matter are transported by radiation pressure from planet to planet with the resultant spread of life throughout interstellar space. He developed a theory to explain the ice ages and other profound climatic changes undergone by the earth's surface. He reflected upon the world's supply of energy and the conservation of natural resources. He dreamed of a universal language and proposed a modified form of English. There was hardly a field of science to which he did not make original, if not universally accepted, contributions. During his last years he wrote several textbooks and many books of a popular nature, in which he made it a point to indicate what was still to be done in the fields under discussion. Arrhenius had a healthy constitution, but he made great demands upon himself in order to maintain his extraordinary productivity. After a brief attack of acute intestinal catarrh in September 1927, he died on October 2 and was buried in Uppsala.

Further Reading

The biography by Wilhelm Palmaer, "Svante Arrhenius, 1859-1927," originally in German, appears in an abridged translation in Eduard Farber, ed., Great Chemists (1961). A thumbnail sketch of Arrhenius and a brief evaluation of the electrolytic dissociation theory are contained in Eduard Farber, Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry, 1901-1961 (1963). Benjamin Harrow, Eminent Chemists of Our Time (1920), explains how Arrhenius formulated his theory of electrolytic dissociation. A popularized summary of his life and work may be found in Bernard Jaffe, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry, from Ancient Alchemy to Nuclear Fission (1930; rev. ed. 1948).

Additional Sources

Svante Arrenius, 1859-1927, Moskva: "Nauka," 1990.

Crawford, Elisabeth T., Arrhenius: from ionic theory to the greenhouse effect, Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications/ USA, 1996.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Svante August Arrhenius

Svante Arrhenius, 1918.
(click to enlarge)
Svante Arrhenius, 1918. (credit: Courtesy of the Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm)
(born Feb. 19, 1859, Vik, Swed. — died Oct. 2, 1927, Stockholm) Swedish physical chemist. His theories on dissociation of substances in solution into electrolytes or ions, first published in 1884 as his Ph.D. thesis, were initially met with skepticism, but increasing recognition abroad gradually won over the opposition in Sweden. He also did important work on reaction rates; the equation describing the dependence of reaction rates on temperature is often called the Arrhenius law, and he was the first to recognize the greenhouse effect. After receiving the Royal Society of London's Davy Medal (1902), he became in 1903 the third recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He is regarded as one of the founders of the field of physical chemistry.

For more information on Svante August Arrhenius, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Arrhenius, Svante August
(sfän'tə, ärā'nēəs) , 1859–1927, Swedish chemist. He was a professor of physics in Stockholm in 1895 and became director of the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry, Stockholm, in 1905. For originating (1884, 1887) the theory of electrolytic dissociation, or ionization, he received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also investigated osmosis and toxins and antitoxins. His works, translated into many languages, include Immunochemistry (1907), Quantitative Laws in Biological Chemistry (1915), The Destinies of the Stars (tr. 1918), and Chemistry in Modern Life (tr. 1925).
 
Wikipedia: Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius
Arrhenius2.jpg
Svante August Arrhenius
Born February 19 1859(1859--)
Vik, Sweden
Died October 2 1927 (aged 68)
Stockholm, Sweden
Residence Flag_of_Sweden.svg Sweden
Nationality Flag_of_Sweden.svg Swedish
Field Physical chemist
Institutions Royal Institute of Technology
Alma mater University of Uppsala
University of Stockholm
Academic advisor   Per Teodor Cleve, Eric Edlund
Notable students   Oskar Benjamin Klein
Known for Arrhenius equation
Notable prizes Nobel_Prize.png Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1903)

Svante August Arrhenius (February 19, 1859 – October 2, 1927) was a Swedish chemist and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. The Arrhenius equation and the lunar crater Arrhenius are named after him.


Early years

Arrhenius was born at Vik (also spelled Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. His father had been a land surveyor for Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory position. At the age of three, Arrhenius taught himself to read, despite his parents' wishes, and by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy.

In later life, Arrhenius enjoyed using masses of data to discover mathematical relationships and laws. At age 8, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in physics and mathematics, and graduating as the youngest and most able student in 1876.

At the University of Uppsala, he was unsatisfied with the chief instructor of physics and the only faculty member who could have supervised him in chemistry, Per Teodor Cleve, so he left to study at the Physical Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm under the physicist Erik Edlund in 1881. His work focussed on the conductivities of electrolytes. In 1884, based on this work, he submitted a 150-page dissertation on electrolytic conductivity to Uppsala for the doctorate. It did not impress the professors, like Per Teodor Cleve, and he received the lowest possible passing grade. Later this very work would earn him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

There were 56 theses put forth in the 1884 dissertation, and most would still be accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications. The most important idea in the dissertation was his explanation of the fact that neither pure salts nor pure water is a conductor, but solutions of salts in water are.

Arrhenius' explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into charged particles (which Michael Faraday had given the name ions many years earlier). Faraday's belief had been that ions were produced in the process of electrolysis; Arrhenius proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, solutions of salts contained ions. He thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions. For weak electrolytes this is still believed to be the case, but modifications (by Peter J. W. Debye and Erich Hückel) were found necessary to account for the behavior of strong electrolytes.

The dissertation was not very impressive to the professors at Uppsala, but Arrhenius sent it to a number of scientists in Europe who were developing the new science of physical chemistry, such as Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Ostwald, and J. H. van 't Hoff. They were far more impressed, and Ostwald even came to Uppsala to persuade Arrhenius to join his research team. Arrhenius declined, however, as he preferred to stay in Sweden for a while (his father was very ill and would die in 1885) and had received an appointment at Uppsala.

Middle period

Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which enabled him to study with Ostwald in Riga (now in Latvia), with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Würzburg, Germany, with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, Austria, and with van 't Hoff in Amsterdam.

In 1889 Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of activation energy, an energy barrier that must be overcome before two molecules will react. The Arrhenius equation gives the quantitative basis of the relationship between the activation energy and the rate at which a reaction proceeds.

In 1891 he became a lecturer at Stockholms Högskola (now Stockholm University), being promoted to professor of physics (with much opposition) in 1895, and rector in 1896.

He was married twice, to Sofia Rudbeck (his former pupil), (who bore him one son) the marriage only lasted two years from 1894 to 1896, and to Maria Johansson (who bore him two daughters and a son), from 1905 onward.

In 1901 Arrhenius was elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, against strong opposition. In 1903 he became the first Swede to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1905, upon the founding of the Nobel Institute for Physical Research at Stockholm, he was appointed rector of the institute, the position where he remained until retirement in 1927. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910[1].

Later years

Eventually, Arrhenius' theories became generally accepted and he turned to other scientific topics. In 1902 he began to investigate physiological problems in terms of chemical theory. He determined that reactions in living organisms and in the test tube followed the same laws. In 1904 he delivered at the University of California a course of lectures, the object of which was to illustrate the application of the methods of physical chemistry to the study of the theory of toxins and antitoxins, and which were published in 1907 under the title Immunochemistry. He also turned his attention to geology (the origin of ice ages), astronomy, physical cosmology, and astrophysics, accounting for the birth of the solar system by interstellar collision. He considered radiation pressure as accounting for comets, the solar corona, the aurora borealis, and zodiacal light.

He thought life might have been carried from planet to planet by the transport of spores, the theory now known as panspermia. He thought of the idea of a universal language, proposing a modification of the English language.

In an extension of his ionic theory Arrhenius proposed definitions for acids and bases, in 1884. He believed that acids were substances which produce hydrogen ions in solution and that bases were substances which produce hydroxide ions in solution.

In his last years he wrote both textbooks and popular books, trying to emphasize the need for further work on the topics he discussed.

In September, 1927, he came down with an attack of acute intestinal catarrh, died on October 2, and was buried in Uppsala.

Greenhouse effect as cause for ice ages

Svante Arrhenius developed a theory to explain the ice ages, and first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect ("On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground", Philosophical Magazine 1896(41): 237-76). He was influenced by the work of others, including Joseph Fourier. Arrhenius used the infrared observations of the moon by Frank Washington Very and Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh to calculate the absorption of CO2 and water vapour. Arrhenius' painstaking calculations were later shown to be erroneous. Using 'Stefan's law' (better known as the Stefan Boltzmann law), he formulated his greenhouse law. In its original form, Arrhenius' greenhouse law reads as follows:

if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

Which is still valid in the simplified expression by Myhre et al. (1998).

ΔF = αln(C/C0)

Arrhenius' high absorption values for CO2, however, met criticism by Knut Ångström in 1900, who published the first modern infrared spectrum of CO2 with two absorption bands. Arrhenius replied strongly in 1901 (Annalen der Physik), dismissing the critique altogether. He touched the subject briefly in a technical book titled Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik (1903). He later wrote Världarnas utveckling (1906), German translation: Das Werden der Welten (1907), English translation: Worlds in the Making (1908) directed at a general audience, where he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population. Arrhenius clearly believed that a warmer world would be a positive change. From that, the hot-house theory gained more attention. Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth (Milankovitch cycles), which has proven to be a powerful predictor of most of the past climate changes for millions of years. Nowadays, the accepted explanation is that orbital forcing sets the timing for ice ages with CO2 acting as an essential amplifying feedback.

Arrhenius estimated that halving of CO2 would decrease temperatures by 4 - 5 °C and a doubling of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 5 - 6 degrees Celsius [1]or 7 - 11 degrees Fahrenheit. Recent (2007) estimates from IPCC say this value (the Climate sensitivity) is likely to be between 2 and 4.5 degrees. What is remarkable is that Arrhenius came so close to the most recent IPCC estimate. Arrhenius expected CO2 levels to rise at a rate given by emissions in his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a much faster rate: Arrhenius expected CO2 doubling to take about 3000 years; it is now predicted to take about a century.

See also

Bibliography

  • Svante Arrhenius, 1884, Recherches sur la conductivité galvanique des électrolytes, doctoral dissertation, Stockholm, Royal publishing house, P.A. Norstedt & söner, 89 pages.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1896a, Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche, in the Proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm 1896, Volume 22, I N. 1, pages 1–101.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1896b, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), April 1896. vol 41, pages 237–275.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1901a, Ueber die Wärmeabsorption durch Kohlensäure, Annalen der Physik, Vol 4, 1901, pages 690–705.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1901b, Über Die Wärmeabsorption Durch Kohlensäure Und Ihren Einfluss Auf Die Temperatur Der Erdoberfläche. Abstract of the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science, 58, 25–58.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1903, Lehrbuch der Kosmischen Physik, Vol I and II, S. Hirschel publishing house, Leipzig, 1026 pages.
  • Svante Arrhenius, 1908, Das Werden der Welten, Academic Publishing House, Leipzig, 208 pages.

External links

Further reading

  • Snelders, H.A.M. (1970). "Arrhenius, Svante August". Dictionary of Scientific Biography 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 296-301. ISBN 0684101149. 
  • Crawford, Elisabeth T. Arrhenius: from ionic theory to the greenhouse effect Canton, MA: Science History Publications. ISBN 0881351660


Nobel Prize in Chemistry Laureates

Jacobus van 't Hoff (1901) • Emil Fischer (1902) • Svante Arrhenius (1903) • William Ramsay (1904) • Adolf von Baeyer (1905) • Henri Moissan (1906) • Eduard Buchner (1907) • Ernest Rutherford (1908) • Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) • Otto Wallach (1910) • Marie Curie (1911) • Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier (1912) • Alfred Werner (1913) • Theodore Richards (1914) • Richard Willstätter (1915) • Fritz Haber (1918) • Walther Nernst (1920) • Frederick Soddy (1921) • Francis Aston (1922) • Fritz Pregl (1923) • Richard Zsigmondy (1925)

Complete roster | (1901-1925) | (1926-1950) | (1951-1975) | (1976-2000) | (2001-2025)


Persondata
NAME Arrhenius, Svante
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Physical chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Vik, Sweden
DATE OF DEATH October 2, 1927
PLACE OF DEATH Stockholm, Sweden

nov:Svante August Arrhenius


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Svante Arrhenius" at WikiAnswers.

 

Copyrights:

Scientist. A Dictionary of Scientists. Copyright © Market House Books Ltd 1993, 1999, 2003. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Svante Arrhenius".  Read more

Search for answers directly from your browser with the FREE Answers.com Toolbar!  
Click here to download now. 

Get Answers your way! Check out all our free tools and products.

On this page:   E-mail   print Print  Link  

 

Keep Reading

Mentioned In:

 |  More >More >
 

Do you have the answers?