Adalbert Farkas

Adalbert Farkas (born June 10, 1906 in Dunaszerdahely, Hungary, † April 8, 1995 ) was an Austrian-American physical chemist .

Life and activity

Farkas was a son of Istvan Farkas and his wife Anna, geb. Patzauer. His brother was the biochemist Ladiszlaus Farkas . After attending school, he studied chemistry at the Technical University in Vienna . In 1928 he received a degree in engineering in Vienna. He then worked from 1928 to 1930 as a scientific assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1930 he received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt as Dr. phil. nat . From 1930 to 1933 he was employed as an unscheduled assistant to Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt am Main .

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Farkas emigrated: He initially found a job at the Department of Colloid Siences at the University of Cambridge . In 1936 he went to Palestine , where he worked as an instructor in physical chemistry until 9141 - a field of research that he established together with his brother in Israel for the first time - at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem .

After his emigration from Germany, Farkas was classified as an enemy of the state by the police forces of the Nazi state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin - which mistakenly still suspected him to be in Great Britain - placed on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who had belonged to the NS- Surveillance apparatus as particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be located and arrested with special priority in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the occupation troops of the occupying troops of the SS.

In 1941 he moved to the United States, where he worked from 1941 to 1946 as a research chemist for the Union Oil Company in Wilmington California; in 1944 he was naturalized in the USA. From 1946 to 1956 he was research director (Research Superintendent) at Barret div. Allied Chemicals in Philadelphia, then department head at Houdry Labs in Marcus Hook (1936-1959) and assistant director for chemical research at the same group from 1960.

Fonts

• About thermal parahydrogen conversion , Leipzig 1931.
• Orthohydrogen, Parahydrogen and Heavy Hydrogen , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1935.
• Experimental Methods in gas Reactions , 1938. (with Harry Work Melville)

As editor :

• L Farkas. Memoirla Volume , 1952.

literature

• World Who's Who in Science: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Scientists from Antiquity to the Present , 1968, p. 546.