CHAPTER 6 THE THIRD LAW AND CRYOGENICS
6.3 CRYOGENICS 159
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
William Francis Giauque (1895–1982)AIP EMILIO SEGR`E VISUAL ARCHIVESBRITTLE BOOKS COLLECTION
William Giauque was an American chemist
who made important contributions to the field
of cryogenics. He received the 1949 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry “for his contributions in the
field of chemical thermodynamics, particularly
concerning the behaviour of substances at ex-
tremely low temperatures.”
Giauque was born in Niagara Falls, On-
tario, Canada, but as his father was a citizen of
the United States, William was able to adopt
American citizenship. His father worked as a
weighmaster and station agent for the Michi-
gan Central Railroad in Michigan.
Giauque’s initial career goal after high
school was electrical engineering. After work-
ing for two years at the Hooker Electrochem-
ical Company in Niagara Falls, New York, he
left to continue his education with the idea of
becoming a chemical engineer. Hearing of the
scientific reputation of G. N. Lewis, the chair
of the chemistry department at the University
of California at Berkeley (page 270 ), and mo-
tivated by the free tuition there, he enrolled in-
stead in that department.a
Giauque spent the rest of his life in the
chemistry department at Berkeley, first as an
undergraduate; then as a graduate student; and
finally, after receiving his Ph.D. in 1922, as
a faculty member. Some of his undergradu-
ate courses were in engineering, which later
helped him in the design and construction of
the heavy equipment for producing the high
magnetic fields and the liquid hydrogen and
helium needed in his research.
Beginning in 1928, with the help of hisgraduate students and collaborators, he began
to publish papers on various aspects of the
third law.b The research included the evalua-
tion of third-law molar entropies and compar-
ison to molar entropies calculated from spec-
troscopic data, and the study of the residual
entropy of crystals. Faint unexplained lines
in the absorption spectrum of gaseous oxygen
led him to the discovery of the previously un-
known^17 O and^18 O isotopes of oxygen.
Giauque’s best-known accomplishment is
his invention and exploitation of cooling to
very low temperatures by adiabatic demagne-
tization. In 1924, he learned of the unusual
properties of gadolinium sulfate octahydrate at
the temperature of liquid helium. In his Nobel
Lecture, he said:c
I was greatly surprised to find, that the applica-
tion of a magnetic field removes a large amount
of entropy from this substance, at a temperature
so low that it had been thought that there was
practically no entropy left to remove.... Those
familiar with thermodynamics will realize that
in principle any process involving an entropy
change may be used to produce either cooling or
heating. Accordingly it occurred to me that adia-
batic demagnetization could be made the basis of
a method for producing temperatures lower than
those obtainable with liquid helium.
It wasn’t until 1933 that he was able to build
the equipment and publish the results from his
first adiabatic demagnetization experiment, re-
porting a temperature of0:25K.d
He was married to a botanist and had two
sons. According to one biography:e
Giauque’s students remember pleasant Thanks-
giving dinners at the Giauque home, with Muriel
[his wife] as cook and Frank (as she called him)
as raconteur, with a keen sense of humor. The
stories he most enjoyed telling were those in
which the joke was on him.... Giauque’s con-
servatism was legendary. He always appeared at
the university dressed in an iron-gray tweed suit.
... A dominant personality himself, Giauque not
only tolerated but respected students who dis-
agreed with him, and he was especially pleased
when they could prove their point.
aRef. [ 132 ]. bRef. [ 154 ]. cRef. [ 61 ]. dRef. [ 58 ]. eRef. [ 132 ].