Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America

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Princeton University Press, 1990 - Science - 402 pages

John Servos explains the emergence of physical chemistry in America by presenting a series of lively portraits of such pivotal figures as Wilhelm Ostwald, A. A. Noyes, G. N. Lewis, and Linus Pauling, and of key institutions, including MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Caltech. In the early twentieth century, physical chemistry was a new hybrid science, the molecular biology of its time. The names of its progenitors were familiar to everyone who was scientifically literate; studies of aqueous solutions and of chemical thermodynamics had transformed scientific knowledge of chemical affinity. By exploring the relationship of the discipline to industry and to other sciences, and by tracing the research of its leading American practitioners, Servos shows how physical chemistry was eclipsed by its own offspring--specialties like quantum chemistry.

 

Contents

Modern Chemistry Is in Need of Reform
3
CHAPTER
4
Physicalist Traditions in Nineteenth
11
Ostwald vant Hoff
20
The New Chemistry of the Ionists
39
CHAPTER 2
46
CHAPTER 3
100
A Massachusetts Yankee Builds a Court
110
The Use and Abuse of the Phase Rule
183
Bancroft Redux
194
CHAPTER 5
202
CHAPTER 6
251
From Base Camp to Temple
263
Chemistry at Caltech
269
From Student to Teacher
275
CHAPTER 7
299

The Anomaly of Strong
120
From Activities to a Table of Free
138
The Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in Retrospect
150
Wilder D Bancroft and His Agenda for Physical
156
Bancroft at Cornell
163
The Appeal of the Phase Rule
174
Bancrofts Journal and American Physical Chemists
308
The End of Bancrofts Editorship and the Birth of the Journal
315
Bancroft and the Traditions of Physical Chemistry
321
150
346
Index
391
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About the author (1990)

John W. Servos is Professor of History at Amherst College.

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