Arnold Orville Beckman

Walter Knott (left) with Arnold Beckman in 1970

Arnold Orville Beckman (born April 10, 1900 in Cullom , Livingston County , Illinois , † May 18, 2004 in La Jolla , San Diego , California ) was an American chemist who founded National Technical Laboratories in 1935 , Beckman Instruments from 1950 , founded in 2010 with the name Beckman Coulter . The foundation was based on his invention of the pH meter .

Life

The son of a blacksmith found a chemistry book at the age of nine and began experimenting. His father supported his interest and let him convert a tool shed into a laboratory. He joined the Navy in August 1918, but was fortunate that the war ended in November. He met Mabel Meinzer at the YMCA .

He went to the University of Illinois , where he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1922, and his master's degree in physical chemistry the following year. For his doctorate he first went to the California Institute of Technology with Roscoe G. Dickinson . He returned to Mabel after a year in New York, where he found a position at Western Electric , for which he developed a quality assurance program for the manufacture of electron tubes . Here he also learned circuit design and began to be interested in electronics.

He married Mabel on June 10, 1925 and went with her to California the following year, where he resumed his studies at Caltech. He studied UV photolysis and worked on an instrument to measure the energy of UV light. In 1928 he received his doctorate and became a professor at Caltech. He also became a consultant for outsiders.

One of his customers was looking for an ink that would not clump. Beckman's solution was butyric acid , but because of its extremely unpleasant odor no one wanted to use it, so he decided to do it himself and, with the help of two students, founded the National Inking Appliance Company . The re-inking of writing tapes was not successful.

Another customer, Sunkist Growers, Inc. , had problems with their own manufacturing process. Unusable lemons were processed into pectins or citric acid. Sunkist had to know the strength of the acid at all times. This is why Beckman invented the pH meter in 1935.

In 1955 he helped found Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments to assist William B. Shockley in his research into semiconductor technology. Because Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto , he set up the laboratory near Mountain View . Thus was Silicon Valley was born.

Beckman was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976 . In 1988 he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation .

literature

• Arnold Thackray, Minor Myers: Arnold O. Beckman ; ( Online )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Understanding Moore's law: four decades of innovation, by David C. Brock, Gordon E. Moore - Google Books . books.google.de. Retrieved October 17, 2009.

Web links

• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Arnold Orville Beckman ( August 6, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive )