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Arnold Orville Beckman, 1900–2004
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rnold O. Beckman, born a blacksmith’s son in Cullom, Ill., was a remarkable man who lived a remarkable life that contributed enormously to society and to chemistry. Analytical chemistry has much to thank him for, and I salute his memory in this Editorial. A symposium in Beckman’s memory, sponsored by the National Academies, was held in November 2004 at the Beckman Center in Irvine, Calif. Instrumentation for a Better Tomorrow: Proceedings of a Symposium in Honor of Arnold Beckman has recently been published by the National Academies Press and is available at www.nap.edu/catalog/11695. html. If you like tales of instruments—and what analytical chemist doesn’t?—then you will enjoy reading this. The life and influence of Beckman are explored in comments by his daughter, Patricia Beckman, and by Arnold Thackray of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Then there are lectures by seven other pioneers in chemical instrumentation, NMR, clinical biology and medicine, forensic chemistry, and others—an appropriate tribute to a person characterized as having inventive restlessness and who actually kept a journal of patentable ideas as a graduate student. Beckman had the great good fortune to have a life that spanned the invention of the vacuum tube, the transistor, and integrated circuits; the emergence of modern ideas in chemistry; and the birth and growth of businesses that provided enabling instruments to chemists. He hit what he called the sweet spot of opportunity, repeatedly, and when it knocked, he answered. In 1922, he earned a degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois, a national powerhouse in chemistry, and then he learned electronics by working at Bell Labs in New York during a period of new research investment by that company. He worked with Walter Shewhart, who was important in early ideas of quality control in measurements. In 1928, Beckman earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), an institution then in its first decade of existence, and was invited to join
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the faculty. Educated in chemistry and electronics, and with a penchant for invention, Beckman worked on instruments for chemistry. A former classmate from Illinois who worked in the citrus fruit industry asked him to think about measuring the acidity of lemon juice. Beckman responded in 1934 with the acidimeter—soon thereafter called the pH meter—and devised a good amplifier to deal with the high impedance of the glass electrode. History was made, but it took Beckman’s persistence to get it noticed—instrument suppliers showed no interest until he went to the Thomas Co. in Philadelphia. Beckman left Caltech to enter business as a catalyst of ideas about chemical instruments, and in a few more years he developed an even more profound legacy instrument, the Beckman DU spectrophotometer. This was a precision single-beam transmission spectrophotometer that was widely adopted by chemists and biochemists for quantitative absorbance measurements. This instrument is one of the most influential developments in chemistry, urging it on to become a more quantitative science. Most readers will not know this instrument, now long superceded by recording spectrophotometers. I count it my own good fortune to have used it as an undergraduate; it is one of the reasons that I am an analytical rather than some other kind of chemist. It was amazing to me to read about all the people whom Beckman met and influenced during his lifetime, for example, Gordon Moore and William Shockley. Beckman Instruments, Inc., in 1955 supported their work at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., a step that led to what is now known as Silicon Valley. But it is impossible for me to recount all of the details in the Academies’ publication. I invite readers to look for themselves and to look at the other instrument developments discussed there. Dr. Beckman, Analytical Chemistry salutes you and your legacy.
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