Charles August Kraus

Charles August Kraus (born August 15, 1875 in Knightsville , Indiana , † June 27, 1967 in Providence , Rhode Island ) was an American chemist .

He was the son of German immigrants. His father had been a winemaker in Traubach before he emigrated to the USA in 1857 and became a farmer near Knightsville. Kraus attended high school in Hayes City and began studying electrical engineering at the University of Kansas in 1893 , but soon turned to physics and physical chemistry. In 1898 he made his bachelor's degree and has already had a number of publications. He spent a year at Johns Hopkins University , in Kansas and then at the University of California. In 1904 he went as a research assistant to Arthur Amos Noyes (1866-1936) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he worked in 1908 with the work Solutions of metals in non-metallic solvents; The apparent molecular weight of sodium Dissolved in liquid ammonia doctorate was in 1912 and assistant professor was.

In 1914 he became professor and director of the chemistry laboratory at Clark University . In 1924 he became professor of chemistry and director of the chemistry laboratory at Brown University , where he remained until his retirement in 1946. Even afterwards he remained scientifically active.

In 1937 he gave the Gibbs Lecture . He received the Nichols Medal in 1923, the Franklin Medal in 1938 , the Willard Gibbs Medal in 1935 , the Theodore William Richards Medal in 1936 and the Priestley Medal in 1950 . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1925), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1915) and President of the American Chemical Society in 1939 . For work during the Second World War , he received the US Navy's highest civilian honor , the Naval Distinguished Public Service Award , in 1948 . He has received multiple honorary doctorates (Brown University, Clark University, Kalamazoo College , Colgate University , Indiana University ).

Kraus dealt with many areas of chemistry and examined in particular the physico-chemical properties of liquid ammonia (as a solvent for electrolytes) and in general with the properties (especially the conductivity) of electrolytic solutions with solvents other than water. Another focus was the chemistry of metal-organic compounds (with silicon, germanium, tin, boron, aluminum, gallium). He developed a process to extract germanium and gallium from their ores.

He was married and had three sons and a daughter.

Fonts

• The properties of electrically conducting systems, American Chemical Society Monograph 1922

Web links

• Biography at the National Academy of Sciences by Raymond Fuoss, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Charles August Kraus at academictree.org, accessed on February 24, 2018.