Biographical Memoirs Volume 65 (1994) / Chapter Skim
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1. Wilder Dwight Bancroft
1. Wilder Dwight Bancroft
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Biographical Memoirs V O L U M E 65
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In America, he became an apostle for the study and application of the phase rule of I Willard Gibbs and, later, an enthusiastic ant]
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Aaron Bancroft, Wilder Bancroft's great-grandfather and the author of a popular life of George Washington, threw over the rigid Calvinism of his youth to become a leacler in the Unitarian movement (luring the early nineteenth century. Wilder Bancroft's grandfather was George Bancroft, the diplomat and cabinet member who is best remembered today for his magisterial history of the United States.
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Following what was by then family custom, Wilder attended Harvard after completing preparatory studies at the Roxbury Latin School and the Milton Academy. Entering in 1884, he compilecl a record that was better than mediocre, although not brilliant.
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Prominent among these was a chemist under whom Bancroft did much of his course work: Josiah Parsons Cooke. A wealthy gentleman of distinguished family who spent summers near the Bancrofts in Newport, Cooke's fame was sufficient to draw talented young men like Theodore William Richards to Harvard.
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in Cooke an example of how secular scholarship might be integrated comfortably into what was still largely a religious culture. Cooke, like George Bancroft, had one foot planted in the patrician world of old New EnglancI, where learning was linked with piety, where scholarship was unclifferentiated, and where educators were dedicated to moicling character, and the other in a new world where the traclitional virtues were valuccl for their contributions to secular success, where knowlecige was specialized, and where teachers transmitted expertise.
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Under Ostwald's energetic leadership, Leipzig had vaultecl into a position of leadership in the study of physical chemistry. SurrounclecI by assistants such as Walther Nernst, Ernst Otto Beckmann, en c!
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Josiah Parsons Cooke was in failing health, and it was clear that the college wouIcl soon need someone to assume responsibility for Cooke's courses. Bancroft tract fine credentials, but so die]
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It was Bancroft who promoted the fournai/ by means of letters to physical chemists around the country, who worked hardest to fill its early issues with articles and reviews, ant! who paid the difference between the cost of publication and income from subscriptions.
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The grievances were many: the need for American students to learn German; the patronizing tone of some German scientists; the delays in obtaining imported glassware, fine chemicals, and equipment; and the slights Americans felt when their work was ignored or neecIlessly duplicatecI abroad.
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Physical chemists investigated and ordered the laws governing chemical change; they were, in Bancroft's view, those chemists who aimed "to present the science of chemistry as a clear and complete whole." Much taken with OstwaId's rhetoric about founding a new science of aligemeine Chemie that would unify the various branches of chemistry, Bancroft saw his lineage as a chemist stretching back through OstwaId to the great generalists of the early nineteenth century. In a review of Mitscherlich's collected works, he asked where the spirit of Mitscherlich still dwelled: "Not among the inorganic chemists for they know little of organic chemistry; not among the organic chemists for they care less for inorganic chemistry.
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Their knowledge gave them license to act as intellectual brokers midcilemen who might prosper by matching techniques to problems, regardless of traditional patterns of interaction among the sciences. In Bancroft's view, wherever matter underwent alteration, whether in the interior of the earth or in stars, in human bodies or in industrial vessels, the physical chemist could both learn and teach.~3 Before physical chemists could meet their duties as generalists, Bancroft believed they would have to find a rational system for organizing their subject.
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By contrast, Bancroft also envisioned a qualitative physical chemistry that would resemble not a timetable but rather a map showing the location of railroad tracks. "If one knows where the railroad tracks are one can predict with absolute accuracy where the trains will run"; likewise, Bancroft suggested, there were means by which the physical chemist could determine the constraints under which a physico-chemical system existed and the directions in which equilibria wouIcl be displaced when subject to changes in
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The phase rule, of course, affords users a subtle but powerful tool for inferring information about the number of components in a system and their mutual relations from such physical data as freezing points or boiling points. Like much of Gibbs's work, the phase rule was largely ignored following its publication.
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Bancroft no doubt learned of the phase rule while studying at Leipzig; he could not have spent the spring of lLS93 in Holland, fast becoming a hotbed of interest in the phase rule, without becoming reacquainted with it. Initially the phase rule made no great impression on the young American.
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After several harsh rebukes, Bancroft abandoned his effort to give such systems precise, quantitative treatment and instead began to view them in the context of Gibbs's phase rule. Shortly after moving to Cornell, this interest found expression in his monograph, The Phase Rule, an extended study not so much of the phase rule itself as of its uses in the classification and analysis of various classes of heterogeneous equilibria.
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But Bancroft was not content to see the phase rule acknowledged as a useful auxiliary in the study of equilibria; it should also, he insisted in his monthly reviews and articles, become the cornerstone of research and education in physical chemistry. While promoting the study of the phase rule, Bancroft also launched assaults on other physical chemists for what he took to be their narrow-minded and exclusive concern with dilute solutions.
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Lewis admits sickness but eliminates error."23 Friendly colleagues viewed Bancroft's passion for the-phase rule as an eccentric but harmless enthusiasm; some members of the "dilute school" understandably saw it as reckless and irrational.
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His frequent review articles in the fournaZ of Physical Chemistry covered topics as diverse as the chemistry of photographic plates, the theory of clyeing, the aging of paints and pigments, and contact catalysis. lust before the war, however, Bancroft commenced work on a new topic that would occupy a central role in his research and writing for the remainder of his career: colloid chemistry.
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together by valence bonds or by mechanical means was an open question.25 During the next four clecacles, the colloidal state and substances which could enter it received sporadic attention from a variety of biochemists, physical chemists, and physicists. This work resulted in a great deal of empirical ciata, a proliferation of special terms, anct some valuable generalizations.
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This flirtation with colloid chemistry became an engagement cluring the winter of lL91L5-lL6, when a fire clestroyoct his apparatus and very nearly consumed the entire chemical laboratory. Until the new Baker Chemical Laboratory was completed in 1923, Bancroft ant!
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been attracted to the phase rule two decades earlier. After his service in the Chemical Warfare Service, Bancroft attempted to consolidate a position of leaclership among American colloicI chemists.
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The result was not a new chemical compound of definite proportions, but a new and larger colloidal aggregate whose properties were modified by the adhesion of additional molecules or ions to its surface. The model he applied to these processes, in other words, was not that of the chemical reaction but rather that of the essentially physical binding of gases to activated charcoal.3~ Nor did Bancroft believe that proteins were capable of entering the state of solution.
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In Paris, the clean of French physical chemists, Jean Perrin, believed that he hack proved that dilute colloidal solutions obeyed the laws of solution, as die! The Sveciberg in Upsala.
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The protein did not physically adsorb dyes or hydrogen ions, as Bancroft suggested, but rather reacted with them to form compounds. Even if a protein could not be isolated as a clef~nite chemical species, "it leads only to confusion to treat it as if it were a compound of some other nature," for in that case, "the extreme specificity of the reactions, the clear cut substitutions of one base or acid for another, pointing clearly to a chemical union, remain wholly unexplained....
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Unsurprisingly, Bancroft faced constant clifficulties in keeping the fournal of Physical Chemistry afloat during the 1920s. Unwilling to consider a merger with the journal of the American Chemical Society that wouIct strip him of his editorial control and unable to meet growing deficits from his own pocket, Bancroft successfully petitioned the Chemical Foundation for support.
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"38 Among the theories that Richter discussed was one developed by the great French physiologist, CIau(le Bernard, in 1875. Anesthetics, according to Bernard, incluced drowsiness and unconsciousness by effecting a "semi-coagulation of the substance of the nerve celis."39 Bancroft, reading Richter's paper, was struck by Bernarcl's idea and quickly translated his terms into the language of colloid chemistry.
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"From my knowledge of colloid chemistry," Bancroft wrote, "it was evident that the objections against Claude Bernarcl's theory were unsouncI. We therefore proceedect to show that the theory was right."40 Convinced that after clecacles of work he hack now stumbled upon a truly important discovery, Bancroft hastened to share it with the world.
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to bestow on Bancroft the William H Nichols Medal in recognition of his work on the colloid chemistry of the nervous system.43 The announcement of this award precipitated an avalanche of congratulatory letters and newspaper stories.
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to claim scientific validity for the application of his notions to medical fields."46 Appalled to discover that their would-be medalist was being charged with quackery, the Nichols Award Committee hurriedly sought to dissociate themselves from the controversy. Three weeks before the medal was to be presented, the chairman of the committee asked Bancroft to accept the award for his work on applications of the phase rule rather than for his "agglomeration theory." Bancroft, nettled by their fickleness, told the committee's chairman that he would refuse the medal before he would accept an alteration in the announced terms of the award.
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Disappointed by the Journal of Physical Chemistry's failure to show signs of growth despite ten years of subsidies and appalled by criticism of Bancroft's foray into pharmacology, the Chemical Foundation abruptly announced that it was terminating its support at the end of 1932. Bancroft, unable to meet the journal s large deficits alone, was compelled to convey ownership and editorial control to the American Chemical Society.
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When Bancroft cried in 1953, he was remembered by former students and friends as a "gentleman-scholar" of somewhat eccentric but always stimulating ideas, an indepenclent-minded critic of conventional wisdom, and a talented mediator between basic and industrial science whose enthusiasm was both virtue and vice. ~ AM GRATEFUL to the staff of the Cornell University Archives for access to the papers of Wilder D
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Forbes, "Josiah Parsons Cooke, fir.," in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 3:397-99; and addresses in commemoration of Josiah Parsons Cooke by his former students, Charles Loring Jackson, Henry Barker Hill, Augustus Lowell, Francis Humphreys Storer, and Charles William Eliot, in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 30 ~ 1895~: 513-47. On Cooke drawing Richards to Harvard, see Theodore William Richards, "Retrospect," National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
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Bancroft, "Des chemische Potential der Metalle," Zeitschrift fur physikalische Chemie 12 (1893~: 289-97; Wilder D Bancroft, "Inorganic Chemistry and the Phase Rule," Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Society 20 ~ 1904~: 40-41.
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Bancroft, Applied Colloid Chemistry: General Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1 92 1 )
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Bancroft, 18 February 1933 and 2 March 1933; Bancroft to Morgan, 22 February 1933, all in 1933-53 and undated box, professional correspondence, Wilder D Bancroft Papers, Cornell University Archives.
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1:760-65. The Phase Rule.
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22:22-43. 1921 Applied Colloid Chemistry, General Theory.
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