Svante Arrhenius
[edit] Biography of Svante Arrhenius
Svante August Arrhenius was born on February 19, 1859, in Wijk, near Uppsala, Swedent.He was son of Svante Gustaf Arrhenius and Carolina Christina Thunberg. 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).
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.
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 he was with Boltzmann in Graz and in 1888 he worked with van 't Hoff in Amsterdam. During these years Arrhenius was able to prove the influence of the electrolytic dissociation on the osmotic pressure, the lowering of the freezing point and increase of the boiling point of solutions containing electrolytes. Later on he studied its importance in connection with biological problems such as the relationship between toxins and antitoxins, serum therapy, its role for digestion and absorption as well as for the gastric and pancreatic juices.
In 1891, Arrhenius declined a professorship offered to him from Giessen, Germany, and soon afterwards he obtained a lectureship in physics at Stockholms Högskola. In 1895 he became Professor of Physics there. He was in addition Rector from 1897 to 1905, when he retired from the professorship.
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.
