William F. Giauque—Nobel Prize for Low-Temperature Research

Abstract

Canadian-born American physical chemist William Francis Giauque was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his studies on the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero. He dedicated more than 60 years to the field of cryogenics, the study of matter at very low temperatures. His work has enabled the chemical industry to produce steel faster and cheaper than before, as well as glass, rubber, and other products. One of the pioneer investigators in low-temperature phenomena, Giauque provided measurements that made it possible to calculate chemical equilibria and to predict the nature of chemical reactions. His tabulations became a major source of data for the calculations of free energies and other thermodynamic properties. Giauque was born on May 12, 1895, in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He was the eldest of 3 children. His parents, William Tecumseh Sherman Giauque and Isabella Jane Duncan, were American and Canadian citizens; his father was a railroad worker. When Giauque was young, his family moved to Michigan, where he attended elementary school. When Giauque's father died in 1908, the family returned to Niagara Falls in Canada. In 1909, Giauque enrolled in Niagara Falls Collegiate and Vocational Institute and graduated in about 1913. For 2 years after his graduation, Giauque worked in the laboratory at the Hooker Electrochemical Company in Niagara Falls, NY. In 1916, Giauque enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley, and in 1920, he received a BS degree in chemistry with highest honors. He remained at the university for graduate work and was a university fellow in 1920-1921 and James M. Goewey Fellow in 1921-1922. In 1922, he was awarded a PhD degree in chemistry (with a minor in physics). His thesis was on the behavior of materials at very low temperatures. Giauque remained at the University of California in Berkeley for the rest of his academic career. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1927, to associate professor in 1930, and to full professor in 1934. During World War II (1939-1945), Giauque devoted his efforts to military research. In this capacity, he designed high-field electromagnets and mobile units for producing liquid oxygen. Shortly after his first retirement in 1962, he was recalled as director of the low-temperature research program; he retired again in 1981. Because Giauque was involved in the research of materials at low temperatures and the measurement of entropy chemicals at low temperature, he became interested in methods to achieve these low temperatures. The lowest temperature achieved before Giauque's work was 0.8 K, reached in 1910 by the 1913 Nobel laureate Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926). Kamerlingh Onnes pumped away the vapors of liquid helium and caused it to evaporate under reduced pressure. Giauque was not satisfied with Kamerlingh Onnes' method and proposed a new method, which he called adiabatic demagnetization. An adiabatic system is one in which heat is neither lost nor gained. In 1937, Giauque was able to use his method to produce temperatures near absolute zero. The basic idea of the adiabatic demagnetization method is to surround a paramagnetic substance with a coil of wire in a gas-filled container. The substance can be cooled by surrounding the container with liquid helium and by magnetizing a current through the coil. Thus, a magnetized substance can be produced at the temperature of liquid helium and then isolated in a vacuum by removing the gas from the container. Giauque described his idea of adiabatic magnetic cooling in 1926 but had to wait until 1933 to put it to use in an experimental situation. With his work, Giauque was the first to validate the third law of thermodynamics, according to which the entropy of a pure crystalline element is zero at a temperature of absolute zero (0 K or -273°C); entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. Besides his work on thermodynamics and cryogenics, Giauque codiscovered (with Herrick L. Johnston in 1929) 2 oxygen isotopes in the earth's atmosphere, one with atomic weight 17 and the other with atomic weight 18. This discovery resulted in a revised scale of atomic weights in 1961. Besides the Nobel Prize, Giauque received many awards and honors, including the Chandler Medal and Honorary ScD from Columbia University, an honorary LLD from the University of California, and the Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute. On March 28, 1982, at the age of 86 years, Giauque died in Oakland, Calif. In 1966, a cryogenics laboratory bearing his name was opened on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and in 2001, Giauque was honored on a stamp (Scott No. 2518f) issued by Antigua and Barbuda.