Acknowledgements
In September 2005, my wife and I spent 2 weeks travelling the eastern
seaboard of the USA acquainting ourselves with recently discovered family
members whose forebears had emigrated from the UK at the turn of the last
century. Having recently retired from my university lectureship in computer
science, but being first-and-foremost a physical chemist—by training and
inclination—I decided to use some of my ‘down time’ on the trip to ‘gently’
re-visit physical chemistry, not of course to keep up with modern developments, but to better understand the lives of some of those who had first
defined the subject and attracted me to it.
One quiet evening with family in their elegant, traditional ‘New England’
home, I began reading Daniel Charles’ biography of Fritz Haber.
2 For my
generation, Fritz Haber was the ‘stand out’ physical chemist of his day. Many
of us in the UK were of course familiar with the Haber process, the
Haber-Bosch process and the Born-Haber cycle. Some were also familiar with
Haber’s contribution to electrochemistry. But few of us were familiar with the
story of his life, he seemingly being a ‘forgotten man’ after his death in 1934.
On page 87 of Charles’ book, I read the following passage:
First, an extraordinary scientist joined Haber’s laboratory, a young Englishman
named Robert Le Rossignol, with a gift for solving practical problems of
engineering. Haber did not know it yet, but the task that lay before him would
2
Daniel Charles, Between Genius and Genocide, Jonathan Cape, London, (2005).
ISBN-0-224-06444-4.
xiii
In September 2005, my wife and I spent 2 weeks travelling the eastern
seaboard of the USA acquainting ourselves with recently discovered family
members whose forebears had emigrated from the UK at the turn of the last
century. Having recently retired from my university lectureship in computer
science, but being first-and-foremost a physical chemist—by training and
inclination—I decided to use some of my ‘down time’ on the trip to ‘gently’
re-visit physical chemistry, not of course to keep up with modern developments, but to better understand the lives of some of those who had first
defined the subject and attracted me to it.
One quiet evening with family in their elegant, traditional ‘New England’
home, I began reading Daniel Charles’ biography of Fritz Haber.
2 For my
generation, Fritz Haber was the ‘stand out’ physical chemist of his day. Many
of us in the UK were of course familiar with the Haber process, the
Haber-Bosch process and the Born-Haber cycle. Some were also familiar with
Haber’s contribution to electrochemistry. But few of us were familiar with the
story of his life, he seemingly being a ‘forgotten man’ after his death in 1934.
On page 87 of Charles’ book, I read the following passage:
First, an extraordinary scientist joined Haber’s laboratory, a young Englishman
named Robert Le Rossignol, with a gift for solving practical problems of
engineering. Haber did not know it yet, but the task that lay before him would
2
Daniel Charles, Between Genius and Genocide, Jonathan Cape, London, (2005).
ISBN-0-224-06444-4.
xiii