Prizemen

U.S. chemists last week placed $1,000 on Professor Linus Carl Pauling as a sure place-winner in their profession and a possible winner of a Nobel Prize. Professor Pauling was 30 last February. At Oregon State Agricultural College where he won his B.S. degree at 21 (no early age) he was a promising, gangling youth always browsing in the chemistry and physics laboratories. Three years later he was a California Institute of Technology Ph.D., no easy distinction under the strict driving of Professor Arthur Amos Noyes, director of Caltech's Gates Chemical Laboratory. Director Noyes kept the brilliant young man at Caltech another year under a National Research Fellowship, then sent him on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to Europe for a look at physical chemistry there. Back went the scholar to Caltech and an assistant professorship. A workout in that position, then an associate professorship; then this year, at 30, a full professorship of theoretical chemistry.

As the 82nd annual meeting of the American Chemical Society approached next week (at Buffalo), Professor Pauling's career and accomplishments were objects of many secret discussions. U.S. Chemistry has had two great rewards for its doers: the William H. Nichols Medal and the Josiah Willard Gibbs Medal.

This year Jacob Fred Schoellkopf, Buffalo power and dye tycoon, contributed a gold medal, named for his late father, to honor important industrial research. First Schoellkopf medalist, named last week, is President Frank Jerome Tone, 63, of Carborundum Co., who helped develop that and other synthetic abrasives, who originated the first commercial process for producing silicon metal (used in electrical transformers, alloys, hydrogen manufacture), who possesses "to an unusual degree the rare combination of the qualities of the pure scientist, the plant engineer, and the successful business administrator." Graduates of Hill School and Cornell of six or seven years ago wondered if President Tone is any relation to popular, broadshouldered Jerry Tone who used to catch on the Cornell baseball team. They are father & son. Jeremiah Tone now works as one of his father's salesmen. Another son is Franchot Jerome Tone, actor (Pagan Lady, Green Grow the Lilacs).

Also this year for the first time Dr. Arthur Comings Langmuir, rich Hastings-on-Hudson authority & manufacturer of shellac and glycerine, elder brother and early teacher of General Electric's famed Dr. Irving Langmuir, offered a $1,000 prize for "accomplishment, in America, of outstanding chemical research by a young man or woman preferably working in a college or university." Caltech's young Professor Pauling is the first Langmuir Prize winner.

Professor Pauling has published some 50 reports of his research on the structure and electronic activity of atoms, molecules and crystals. The scientific goal of his search is to learn and explain the bonds which hold elements together. He has demonstrated that the union of elements is an interatomic electrical phenomenon. For benzene, mother of a multitude of useful organic products, he has been able to diagram the binding process. A molecule of benzene contains six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms. The carbon atoms he figures at the apices of a hexagon, the benzene "ring." Racing in an ellipse around each adjacent pair of carbon atoms on the hexagon's perimeter are a pair of electrons. Racing in longer ellipses across the hexagon and around pairs of diametrically opposite carbon atoms are three more pairs of binding electrons. Thus the carbon atoms are held tightly within the benzene ring.

The six hydrogen atoms must still be accounted for. One hydrogen atom pairs with each of the six carbon atoms. In an ellipse around each carbon atom and its companion hydrogen atom races still another brace of binding electrons. Thus each hydrogen atom is held by one pair of electrons, each carbon atom by three pairs of electrons. This is called the Pauling Structure. It makes the various chemical behaviors of benzene more understandable.

Director Noyes of Caltech calls Professor Pauling "the most promising young man with whom I have ever come in contact in my many years of teaching." Dr. Langmuir calls him "a rising star, who may yet win the Nobel Prize."

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