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Bertram Boltwood
Bertram Borden Boltwood (July 27, 1870 – August 15, 1927) was an American pioneer of radiochemistry.
Boltwood attended Yale University, became a professor there and in 1910 was appointed chair of the first academic department of radiochemistry. He established that lead (the metal) was the final decay product of uranium, noted that the lead-uranium ratio was greater in older rocks and, acting on a suggestion by Ernest Rutherford, he was the first to measure the age of rocks by the decay of uranium to lead, in 1907. He obtained results of 400 to 2200 million years, the first successful use of radioactive decay by Pb/U chemical dating. More recently, older mineral deposits have been dated to about 4.4 billion years old, close to the best estimate of the age of Earth.
His work with the uranium decay series led to the discovery of the parent of radium, a new element that he named ionium. Once the existence of isotopes was established, ionium was shown to in fact be thorium-230. Although Boltwood did not get his element on the periodic table, he later got a mineral namesake: Boltwoodite which is named after him.
In his later days, Boltwood suffered from depression and committed suicide on August 15, 1927.
Bertram Boltwood was born on July 27, 1870, in the Amherst, Massachusetts home of his grandfather, Lucius Boltwood. After relocating from England in the 17th century, the Boltwood family was active in the Amherst community for generations. Lucius was the son of a farmer who worked his way through Williams College to become a lawyer. He was a founder of Amherst College and ran for Governor of Massachusetts as an early member of the Liberty Party in 1841. Thomas Kast Boltwood, son of Lucius, was a lawyer who died in 1872 when his son Bertram was 2 years old. Bertram Boltwood was emotionally close with his mother, Margaret Mathilda, and he grew up in her hometown of Castleton, NY. She prepared him to attend Yale, his father's alma mater, by placing him in private school at a young age, followed by the Albany Academy.
Boltwood’s childhood reveals influences and inclinations that foreshadow the scientist he became as an adult. As a boy, he was interested in mechanical gadgets and enjoyed hobbies such as fishing, photography, and minerals. The latter was likely the influence of his uncle, Charles Upham Shepard, who was a mineralogist and a chemist. His personality was reportedly light-hearted, and he was known to play practical jokes in his youth. He was often reminded of a familial tie to Ralph Waldo Emerson through his paternal great-grandmother’s sister (Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins), and it was expected that Boltwood would study and succeed in line with the family legacy.
He graduated with high honors in chemistry from Yale in 1892, and went on to study analytical methods of inorganic chemistry and rare earth elements for two years in Germany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Afterwards, he returned to Yale and earned a PhD in 1897 and became an instructor in the Sheffield Scientific School there from 1896 to 1900. His teaching and research work at Yale focused on physical chemistry, despite it being a relatively new field. Lacking resources in English for teaching the subject, he translated two books from German, Alexander Classen, "Quantitative Analysis by Electrolysis," and the other by Charles Van Deventer, "Physical Chemistry for Beginners." He was particularly handy in the lab, often improving upon methods and devices. For example, he developed a low melting point wax that found use in labs across the country and was called, "Boltwax".
From 1900 to 1906, he had a private lab in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked as a consulting chemist, analyzing ore samples for miners. This experience brought him into contact with the rare earth metals he had studied as well as uranium and thorium, elements that would become the crux of his greatest scientific contributions.
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Bertram Boltwood
Bertram Borden Boltwood (July 27, 1870 – August 15, 1927) was an American pioneer of radiochemistry.
Boltwood attended Yale University, became a professor there and in 1910 was appointed chair of the first academic department of radiochemistry. He established that lead (the metal) was the final decay product of uranium, noted that the lead-uranium ratio was greater in older rocks and, acting on a suggestion by Ernest Rutherford, he was the first to measure the age of rocks by the decay of uranium to lead, in 1907. He obtained results of 400 to 2200 million years, the first successful use of radioactive decay by Pb/U chemical dating. More recently, older mineral deposits have been dated to about 4.4 billion years old, close to the best estimate of the age of Earth.
His work with the uranium decay series led to the discovery of the parent of radium, a new element that he named ionium. Once the existence of isotopes was established, ionium was shown to in fact be thorium-230. Although Boltwood did not get his element on the periodic table, he later got a mineral namesake: Boltwoodite which is named after him.
In his later days, Boltwood suffered from depression and committed suicide on August 15, 1927.
Bertram Boltwood was born on July 27, 1870, in the Amherst, Massachusetts home of his grandfather, Lucius Boltwood. After relocating from England in the 17th century, the Boltwood family was active in the Amherst community for generations. Lucius was the son of a farmer who worked his way through Williams College to become a lawyer. He was a founder of Amherst College and ran for Governor of Massachusetts as an early member of the Liberty Party in 1841. Thomas Kast Boltwood, son of Lucius, was a lawyer who died in 1872 when his son Bertram was 2 years old. Bertram Boltwood was emotionally close with his mother, Margaret Mathilda, and he grew up in her hometown of Castleton, NY. She prepared him to attend Yale, his father's alma mater, by placing him in private school at a young age, followed by the Albany Academy.
Boltwood’s childhood reveals influences and inclinations that foreshadow the scientist he became as an adult. As a boy, he was interested in mechanical gadgets and enjoyed hobbies such as fishing, photography, and minerals. The latter was likely the influence of his uncle, Charles Upham Shepard, who was a mineralogist and a chemist. His personality was reportedly light-hearted, and he was known to play practical jokes in his youth. He was often reminded of a familial tie to Ralph Waldo Emerson through his paternal great-grandmother’s sister (Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins), and it was expected that Boltwood would study and succeed in line with the family legacy.
He graduated with high honors in chemistry from Yale in 1892, and went on to study analytical methods of inorganic chemistry and rare earth elements for two years in Germany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Afterwards, he returned to Yale and earned a PhD in 1897 and became an instructor in the Sheffield Scientific School there from 1896 to 1900. His teaching and research work at Yale focused on physical chemistry, despite it being a relatively new field. Lacking resources in English for teaching the subject, he translated two books from German, Alexander Classen, "Quantitative Analysis by Electrolysis," and the other by Charles Van Deventer, "Physical Chemistry for Beginners." He was particularly handy in the lab, often improving upon methods and devices. For example, he developed a low melting point wax that found use in labs across the country and was called, "Boltwax".
From 1900 to 1906, he had a private lab in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked as a consulting chemist, analyzing ore samples for miners. This experience brought him into contact with the rare earth metals he had studied as well as uranium and thorium, elements that would become the crux of his greatest scientific contributions.
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