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Arrhenius was born at Vik (also spelled Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. His father had been a land surveyor at the University of Uppsala, moving up to a supervisory position. At the age of three, Arrhenius taught himself to read, despite his parents' wishes, and by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy.
In later life, Arrhenius enjoyed using masses of data to discover mathematical relationships and laws. At age 8, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in physics and mathematics, and graduating as the youngest and ablest student in 1876.
At the University of Uppsala, he was unsatisfied with the chief instructor of physics and the only faculty member who could have supervised him in chemistry, so he left to study at the Physical Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in StockholmStockholm ['stɔkhɔlm, ˘stɔkhɔlm] is the capital and the largest City of Sweden. The City of Stockholm is administratively a municipality within Stockholm County, the population of the city proper is 761,721 (2004), with under the physicist Erik Edlund in 1881Events January 16- 24 ? Siege of Geok Tepe ? Russian troops under general Skobeleff defeat Turkomans January 25 Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company February 5 Phoenix, Arizona is incorporated. February 13 First issu. His work specialized on the conductivitiesElectrical conductivity is a measure of how well a material accommodates the transport of electric charge. Its SI derived unit is the siemens per metre ( A2 s3 m-3 kg-1) (named after Werner von Siemens). It is the ratio of the current density to the elect of electrolyteAn electrolyte is a substance which dissociates free ions when dissolved (or molten), to produce an electrically conductive medium. Because they generally consist of ions in solution, electrolytes are also known as ionic solutes . They are sometimes refers. In 18841884 is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar). Events January 4 The Fabian Society is founded in London. February 1 Edition one of the Oxford English Dictionary is published. March 13 The siege of Khartoum, Sudan begins (ends on Janu, based on this work, he submitted a 150-page dissertation on electrolytic conductivity to Uppsala for the doctorateDoctor of Philosophy Ph. an abbreviation for the Latin Philosophiae Doctor , or in non-Anglo-Saxon (e. German and Scandinavian) usage Doctor philosophi Dr. was originally a degree granted by a university to a learned individual who had achieved the approv. It did not impress the professors, and he received the lowest possible passing grade. Later this very work would earn him the Nobel Prize in ChemistryList of Nobel Prize laureates in Chemistry from 1901 to the present day. 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s External link http://www. se/chemistry/laureates/i.
There were 56 theses put forth in the 1884 dissertation, and most would still be accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications. The most important idea in the dissertation was his explanation of the fact that neither pure saltFor other meanings of the word salt see salt (disambiguation In chemistry, a salt is a composed of positively charged cations and negatively charged anions, so that the product is neutral and without a net charge. They are typically the product of a chemis nor pure water conducts electricity, but solutions of salts in water do.
Arrhenius' explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into charged particles (which Michael Faraday had given the name ions many years earlier). Faraday's belief had been that ions were produced in the process of electrolysis; Arrhenius proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, solutions of salts contained ions. He thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions. For weak electrolytes this is still believed the case, but modifications (by Peter J. W. Debye and Erich Hückel) were found necessary to account for the behavior of strong electrolytes.
The dissertation was not very impressive to 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 J. H. van 't Hoff. They were far more impressed, and Ostwald even came to Uppsala to persuade Arrhenius to join his research team. Arrhenius declined, however, as he preferred to stay in Sweden for a while (his father was very ill and would die in 1885) and had gotten an appointment at Uppsala.
Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which enabled him to study with Ostwald in Riga (now in Latvia), with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Würzburg, Germany, with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, Austria, and with van 't Hoff in Amsterdam.
In 1889 Arrhenius 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 Technical University of Stockholm, being promoted to professor of physics (with much opposition) in 1895, and rector in 1896.
He developed a theory to explain the ice ages, and first formulated the idea that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect ("On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground", Philosophical Magazine 41: 237-76).
He was married twice, to Sofia Rudback (who bore him one son) from 1894 to 1896, and to Maria Johansson (who bore him two daughters and a son), from 1905 onward.
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.
Eventually, Arrhenius' 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. He also turned his attention to astronomy and cosmic physics , 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.
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, died on October 2, and was buried in Uppsala.
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