Wallace Reed Brode

Wallace Reed Brode (born June 12, 1900 in Walla Walla , † August 13, 1974 ) was an American chemist and science organizer. He dealt primarily with spectroscopy and dyes.

Life

Brode studied at Whitman College (where his father Howard Brode was Professor of Biology) and from 1921 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master’s degree in 1922 and a doctorate in chemistry with Roger Adams in 1925 (A study of optically active dyes , mechanism of dyeing and absorption spectra). He then continued his studies as a Guggenheim Fellow in Leipzig (with Arthur Hantzsch , Zurich (with Victor Henri ) and Liverpool (with ECC Baly, RA Morton) from 1926 to 1928. In 1928 he became Assistant Professor, 1932 Associate Professor and 1938 Professor of Organics Chemistry at Ohio State University in Columbus , which he stayed until 1948. From 1945 to 1947 he was research director at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in Inyokern , California. 1944/45 he was head of the Paris group of the Office of Research and Scientific Development, the the scientific advances of the axis powers explored and auswertete (z. B. hydrogen as the fuel of V2). He advised shortly after the war temporarily the CIA and was from 1948 deputy director of the National Bureau of standards in Washington DC under the then Director Edward Condon said he also had a small research laboratory, and from 1958 to 1960 he was science advisor to the US Secretary of State ( John Foster Dulles et al nd its successor), which fell during the turbulent time of the Sputnik shock .

In 1939 he published a book on optical spectroscopy in chemistry, which became a standard work there. He dealt with the connection between absorption spectra and structure of organic dyes, analytical applications of spectroscopy and optically active dyes. He used construction kit models (balls with plug-in connections) for chemistry teaching purposes early on and had them produced by the Sargent company in 1930. In 1941 he built one of the first spectrophotometers and polarimeters with recording.

In 1969 he was President of the American Chemical Society and in 1961 of the Optical Society of America (at times he edited the Journal of the Optical Society of America). In 1960 he received the Priestley Medal . In 1948 he became a member of the National Research Council. From 1957 to 1972 he was on the Board of Directors of Science Service (Society for Science & the Public). In 1961 he became president of Sigma Xi. From 1960 he was a director at Barnes Engineering Corp.

He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1954 . In 1958 he became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served on the council of the American Physical Society .

Brode observed solar eclipses on six expeditions, including in Siberia in 1936. He and his wife also did a lot of research on the Native American culture of the American Southwest, collecting their artifacts, traveling extensively and examining the dyes in their ceramics.

Brode was the brother of the physicist Robert Brode (1900-1986), who was a professor at Berkeley. He was married twice. The first marriage to an NBS physicist ended in divorce. In his second marriage he was married to the nurse Ione "Sunny" Sundstrom, who saved his life in 1941 when he fell ill with an infection and was given antibiotics (initially the wrong drug).

literature

Entry in Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists, Harri Deutsch 1989
Ralph A. Sawyer, Obituary in Physics Today, Volume 27, Nov. 1974

Fonts

Chemical Spectroscopy 1939

Web links

Biographical Memoirs Nat. Acad. Sci., McClure, pdf

References and comments

↑ biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Wallace R. Brode at academictree.org, accessed on 14 January 2018th
↑ Resigned in 1951 following persecution by the McCarthy Committee. Even under the successor Allen V. Astin there was unrest at the NBS when he was temporarily dismissed by the Secretary of State for Commerce von Eisenhower because the NBS had declared a commercial battery additive (ADX-2) to be worthless.

personal data
SURNAME	Brode, Wallace Reed
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American chemist and science organizer
DATE OF BIRTH	June 12, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH	Walla Walla
DATE OF DEATH	August 13, 1974

[1] raphical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Wallace R. Brode at academictree.org, accessed on 14 January 2018th

[2] Resigned in 1951 following persecution by the McCarthy Committee. Even under the successor Allen V. Astin there was unrest at the NBS when he was temporarily dismissed by the Secretary of State for Commerce von Eisenhower because the NBS had declared a commercial battery additive (ADX-2) to be worthless.