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Svante Arrhenius

Swedish scientist (1859–1927)

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Svante Arrhenius (* 19. Februar 1859 auf Gut Wik bei Uppsala; † 2. Oktober 1927 in Stockholm)
Photogravure Meisenbach Riffarth & Co. Leipzig. · Public domain

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Arrhenius was the first to use the principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in the atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth's increasing surface temperature. His work played an important role in the emergence of modern climate science. In the 1960s, Charles David Keeling reliably measured the level of carbon dioxide present in the air showing it was increasing and that, according to the greenhouse hypothesis, it was sufficient to cause significant global warming.

The Arrhenius equation, Arrhenius acid, Arrhenius base, lunar crater Arrhenius, Martian crater Arrhenius, the mountain of Arrheniusfjellet, and the Arrhenius Labs at Stockholm University were so named to commemorate his contributions to science.

Biography

Early years

Arrhenius was born on 19 February 1859 at Vik (which can also be spelled as Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala, Kingdom of Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius, who were Lutheran. 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 without the encouragement of his parents and, by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy. In later life, Arrhenius was profoundly passionate about mathematical concepts, data analysis and discovering their relationships and laws.

At age eight, 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.

Ionic disassociation

At the University of Uppsala, he was dissatisfied 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 focused 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, who included Cleve, and he received a fourth-class degree, but upon his defense it was reclassified as third-class. Later, extensions of this very work would earn him the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Arrhenius put forth 56 theses in his 1884 dissertation, most of which would still be accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications. The most important idea in the dissertation was his explanation of the fact that solid crystalline salts disassociate into paired charged particles when dissolved, for which he would win the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arrhenius's explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt disassociates into charged particles that Michael Faraday had given the name ions many years earlier. Faraday's belief had been that ions were produced in the process of electrolysis, that is, an external direct current source of electricity was necessary to form ions. Arrhenius proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, aqueous solutions of salts contained ions. He thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions.

The dissertation did not impress 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 Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff. They were far more impressed, and Ostwald even came to Uppsala to persuade Arrhenius to join his research team in Riga. Arrhenius declined, however, as he preferred to stay in Sweden-Norway for a while (his father was very ill and would die in 1885) and had received an appointment at Uppsala.

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

Middle period

In 1885, Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which enabled him to study with Ostwald in Riga and Leipzig, with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Würzburg, Germany, with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, Austria, and with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in Amsterdam.

In 1889, while carrying out research with Ostwald at Leipzig University, Arrhenius developed what is now known as the Arrhenius equation. He 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 the Stockholm University College (Stockholms Högskola, now Stockholm University), being promoted to professor of physics (with much opposition) in 1895, and rector in 1896.

Nobel Prizes

About 1900, Arrhenius became involved in setting up the Nobel Institutes and the Nobel Prizes. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1901. For the rest of his life, he would be a member of the Nobel Committee on Physics and a de facto member of the Nobel Committee on Chemistry. He used his positions to arrange prizes for his friends (Jacobus van 't Hoff, Wilhelm Ostwald, Theodore Richards) and to attempt to deny them to his enemies (Paul Ehrlich, Walther Nernst, Dmitri Mendeleev). 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.

In 1911, he won the first Willard Gibbs Award.

Society memberships

He was elected an International Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1908.

He was elected an Honorary Member of the Netherlands Chemical Society in 1909.

He became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1910.

He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1911.

In 1912, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In 1919, he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Later years

Eventually, Arrhenius's 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, Berkeley 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.

He was a board member for the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene (founded 1909), which endorsed mendelism at the time, and contributed to the topic of contraceptives around 1910. However, until 1938 information and sale of contraceptives was prohibited in the Kingdom of Sweden. Gordon Stein wrote that Svante Arrhenius was an atheist. Other sources present him as a Lutheran.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 and died on 2 October. He was buried in Uppsala.

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