Chemical Meeting

The outstanding chemical experiment of the year was performed last week at Minneapolis where the American Chemical Society was conducting its 78th annual meeting. Only a few score chemists witnessed the demonstration, and of those very few knew what it was all about.

Para-Hydrogen. Dr. K. F. Bonhoeffer, 30, timid, blond lecturer in chemistry at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Berlin,/- demonstrated that there are two kinds of hydrogen molecules. Around a glass tube filled with charcoal he poured liquid hydrogen which cooled the charcoal to almost absolute zero. Then through the frozen charcoal he pumped ordinary hydrogen which, as it poured out of the tube, passed over a wire heated to incandescence. A small mirror reflected a beam of light on a screen. As the treated hydrogen struck the glowing wire it interfered with the light and caused the mirror beam to move in one direction. That done, Dr. Bonhoeffer passed untreated hydrogen over the same wire. The mirror beam moved differently. That was proof that he had two different kinds of hydrogen, which he called orthohydrogen and parahydrogen.

Practically all the chemists who witnessed the experiment believed that Dr. Bonhoeffer had split the hydrogen atom. Newspapers so reported the event. That was ridiculous. The hydrogen atom, simplest of the 92 elements, has a single proton at its centre and a single electron swinging around that centre. The two may be particles or they may be waves. (The experiment tended to prove that they were waves.) But they are indivisible. To break them up would wipe them out of existence. However, the hydrogen molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms. Chemists and physicists have believed that both electrons revolve about their respective protons in the same direction. Dr. Bonhoeffer proved that in one type of hydrogen the electrons do just that. In the other type they revolve in opposite directions.

Langmuir's Comments. Retiring society president, General Electric's Dr. Irving Langmuir called this "the greatest chemical achievement of 1929." An American, Dennison, had predicted its accomplishment.

Garvan's Random Thoughts. Francis Patrick Garvan, lawyer, onetime (1919) Alien Property Custodian, brother-in-law of Nicholas Frederic Brady (Anaconda Copper), received in absentia the society's Priestley Medal, its highest award, for "distinguished service to chemistry," for being "the greatest lay patron of chemistry in this country." He organized and is president of Chemical Foundation, Inc., to which he sold the War-expropriated German chemical patents. Stockholders of the foundation are U. S. chemical concerns which pay it royalties on its patents and which later get back the greater portion of their payments as dividends. The residue goes "for educational research work in chemistry.

The only previous recipients of the Priestley Medal have been the late President Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins and the late Provost Edgar Fahs Smith of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Garvan could not travel to Minneapolis from Manhattan because "three years ago I broke down. Some say that breakdown was the result of my endeavors to establish independent and sufficient chemical education, chemical research and chemical industries in America. . . ." This apology and the rest of Mr. Garvan's "random thoughts of a lay chemist," Professor Julius Oscar Stieglitz of the University of Chicago read for absent Mr. Garvan.

Another of those random thoughts was this brave offer: "The Chemical Foundation stands ready to bear all the expenses of any commission "the President may care to appoint to inquire into the vast possibilities of chemistry as an agent of peace, outlawing war by its terrors, advancing health and prosperity by its humane discoveries."

President Hoover's response was a succinct telegram: "Glad to join in congratulating Mr. Garvan and the American Chemical Society on the Priestley Medal award."

/- Where lecture Max Planck (quantum theory), Albert Einstein, (relativity) and Erwin Schroedinger (wave mechanics).