Czech Analyzer

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace considered a Czech electrical device for analyzing chemicals so highly useful that it imported the inventor last week, let him pause only briefly in Manhattan, sent him post-haste to Berkeley, Calif. There he will be Professor Charles Bernard Lipman's house guest. After the University of California has Professor Jaroslav Heyrovsky for one month, he will spend another month at Stanford. Then Caltech will get him for two months. He expects those institutions, and many other rich ones, will buy his device. Enterprising Universities of Michigan, Chicago and Ohio already have them, only ones in the Western Hemisphere.

Polarograph is the device's name; quick, precise qualitative and quantitative chemical analysis is its purpose. It can tell the nature and constituents of a substance in from three to five minutes. It can detect substances dissolved in one million times their volume of water, and can do this with just two drops of the solution. It can detect the relative amounts of almost identical substances in a mixture, as fumaric and maleic acids. It can detect minute traces of poisonous adulterants of alcohol and ether, natural and synthetic vinegar, normal and abnormal urine. Professor Heyrovsky, who has been working with and refining the polarograph for a decade, declares it quicker, more sensitive, more accurate than any other method of analysis.

All he does is put a substance to be examined into a small beaker. At the beaker's bottom lies a layer of mercury, the anode of a delicately balanced electrical system. Cathode of the system is a column of mercury which flows by separate drops (two to three seconds apart) into the substance to be analyzed. The current which flows through the system increases steadily by definite increments. Substances react in a regular way to the current. By means of a mirror galvanometer, the polarograph marks a chart when reactions occur. Professor Heyrovsky & colleagues have prepared scores of polarograph charts. Every user of a polarograph furnishes charts of more substances. By comparing the chart of an unknown substance with available polarograph records, the investigator soon solves his analysis problem.

Professor Jaroslav Heyrovsky is 43, medium tall, slim, dark-eyed, dark-haired, sharp-featured, thin-lipped, good-humored. His family is at Prague's social top. His father taught Roman Law at Prague. He teaches physics and chemistry at Charles University, Prague, is a fellow of the University College of London where he perfected his science and English.

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