Arnold Orville Beckman (1900–2004) was an American chemist, inventor, investor, and philanthropist. While a professor at California Institute of Technology, he founded Beckman Instruments based on his 1934 invention of the pH meter, a device for
measuring acidity (and alkalinity), later considered to have "revolutionized the study of chemistry and biology". He also developed the DU spectrophotometer, "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience".[2]
Beckman funded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first silicon transistor company in California, thus giving rise to Silicon Valley. After retirement, he and his wife Mabel (1900–1989) were numbered among the top philanthropists in the United
States.

Early life
Beckman was born in Cullom IL, a village of about 500 people in a farming community. He was the youngest son of George Beckman, a blacksmith, and his second wife Elizabeth Ellen Jewkes.  He was curious about the world from an early age. When he was 9,
Beckman found an old chemistry textbook, Joel Dorman Steele's Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry, and began trying out the experiments.  His father encouraged his scientific interests by letting him convert a toolshed into a laboratory.

Beckman's mother, Elizabeth, died of diabetes in 1912. Beckman's father sold his blacksmith shop, and became a travelling salesman for blacksmithing tools and materials. A housekeeper, Hattie Lange, was engaged to look after the Beckman children. Arnold
Beckman earned money as a "practice pianist" with a local band, and as an "official cream tester" running a centrifuge for a local store.

In 1914, the Beckman family moved to Normal, located just north of Bloomington IL, so that the young Beckmans could attend University High School in Normal, a "laboratory school" associated with Illinois State Univ.  In 1915 they moved to Bloomington
itself,  but continued to attend University High, where Arnold Beckman obtained permission to take university level classes from professor of chemistry Howard W. Adams.  While still in high school, Arnold started his own business, "Bloomington
Research Laboratories", doing analytic chemistry for the local gas company.  He also performed at night as a movie-house pianist, and played with local dance bands.  He graduated valedictorian of his class, with an average of 89.41 over four years,
the highest attained. 

Beckman was allowed to leave school a few months early to contribute to the First World War effort in early 1918 by working as a chemist. At Keystone Steel and Iron he took samples of molten iron and tested them to see if the chemical composition of
carbon, sulfur, manganese and phosphorus was suitable for pouring steel.

When Beckman turned 18 in Aug 1918, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. After 3 months at marine boot camp on Parris Island SC,  he was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for transit to the war in Europe. Because of a train delay, another unit embarked in
place of Beckman's unit. Then, counted into groups in the barracks, Beckman missed being sent to Russia by one space in line.  Instead, Arnold spent Thanksgiving at the local YMCA, where he met 17-year-old Mabel Stone Meinzer, who was helping to serve
the meal. Mabel would become his wife.  A few days later, the armistice was signed, ending the war.

University education
Beckman attended the UI Urbana–Champaign beginning in the fall of 1918. During his freshman year, he worked with Carl Shipp Marvel on the synthesis of organic mercury compounds, but both men became ill from exposure to toxic mercury.  As a result,
Beckman changed his major from organic chemistry to physical chemistry, where he worked with Worth Rodebush, T. A. White, and Gerhard Dietrichson.  He earned his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1922 and his master's degree in physical
chemistry in 1923. For his master's degree he studied the thermodynamics of aqueous ammonia solutions, a subject introduced to him by T. A. White. 

Soon after arriving at the Univ. of Illinois, Beckman joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity.  He was initiated into Zeta chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma, the chemistry fraternity, in 1921 and the Gamma Alpha Graduate Scientific Fraternity in Dec 1922.

Beckman decided to go to Caltech for his doctorate. He stayed there for a year, before returning to New York to be near his fiancée, Mabel, who was working as a secretary for the Equitable Life Assurance Society. He found a job with Western Electric's
engineering department, the precursor to the Bell Telephone Lab. Working with Walter A. Shewhart,  Beckman developed quality control programs for the manufacture of vacuum tubes and learned about circuit design. It was here that Beckman discovered his
interest in electronics.

Beckman married Mabel on June 10, 1925.  In 1926 the couple moved back to California and Beckman resumed his studies at Caltech. He became interested in ultraviolet photolysis and worked with his doctoral advisor, Roscoe G. Dickinson, on an instrument
to find the energy of ultraviolet light. It worked by shining the ultraviolet light onto a thermocouple, converting the incident heat into electricity, which drove a galvanometer. After receiving a Ph.D. in photochemistry in 1928 for this application of
quantum theory to chemical reactions, Beckman was asked to stay on at Caltech as an instructor and then as a professor. Linus Pauling, another of Roscoe G. Dickinson's grad students, was also asked to stay on at Caltech. 

In 1933, Beckman and his family built a home in Altadena CA, in the foothills and adjacent to Pasadena. They lived in Altadena for over 27 years, raising their family.

Teaching and consultancy at Caltech
During his time at Caltech, Beckman was active in teaching at both the introductory and advanced graduate levels. Beckman shared his expertise in glass-blowing by teaching classes in the machine shop. He also taught classes in the design and use of
research instruments. Beckman dealt first-hand with the chemists' need for good instrumentation as manager of the chemistry dept's instrument shop.  Beckman's interest in electronics made him very popular within the chemistry department at Caltech, as
he was very skilled in building measuring instruments.

Over the time that he was at Caltech, the focus of the department increasingly moved towards pure science and away from chemical engineering and applied chemistry. Arthur Amos Noyes, head of the chemistry division, encouraged both Beckman and chemical
engineer William Lacey to be in contact with real-world engineers and chemists, and Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech's president, referred technical questions to Beckman from government and businesses.  With their blessing, Beckman began accepting
outside work as a scientific and technical consultant. He also acted as a scientific expert in legal trials.

pH Meter
Sunkist Growers was having problems with its own manufacturing process. Lemons that were not saleable as produce were made into pectin or citric acid, with SO2 used as a preservative. Sunkist needed to know the acidity of the product at any given time,
and the colorimetric methods then in use, such as readings from litmus paper, did not work well because sulfur dioxide interfered with them. Chemist Glen Joseph at Sunkist was attempting to measure the hydrogen-ion concentration in lemon juice
electrochemically, but sulfur dioxide damaged hydrogen electrodes, and non-reactive glass electrodes produced weak signals and were fragile.

Joseph approached Beckman, who proposed that instead of trying to increase the sensitivity of his measurements, he amplify his results. Beckman, familiar with glassblowing, electricity, and chemistry, suggested a design for a vacuum-tube amplifier and
ended up building a working apparatus for Joseph. The glass electrode used to measure pH was placed in a grid circuit in the vacuum tube, producing an amplified signal which could then be read by an electronic meter. The prototype was so useful that
Joseph requested a second unit. 

Beckman saw an opportunity, and rethinking the project, decided to create a complete chemical instrument which could be easily transported and used by nonspecialists. By Oct 1934, he had registered patent application US Patent No. 2,058,761 for his "
acidimeter", later renamed the pH meter. The Arthur H. Thomas Company, a nationally known scientific instrument dealer based in Philadelphia, was willing to try selling it. Although it was priced expensively at $195, roughly the starting monthly wage for
a chemistry prof at that time, it was significantly cheaper than the estimated cost of building a comparable instrument from individual components, about $500.  The original pH meter weighed in at nearly 7 kg, but was a substantial improvement over a
benchful of delicate equipment. The earliest meter had a design glitch, in that the pH readings changed with the depth of immersion of the electrodes, but Beckman fixed the problem by sealing the glass bulb of the electrode.

On April 8, 1935, Beckman renamed his company National Technical Labs, formally acknowledging his new focus on the making of scientific instruments.  The company rented larger quarters at 3330 Colorado St.,  and began manufacturing pH meters. The pH
meter is an important device for measuring the pH of a solution, and by 11 May 1939, sales were successful enough that Beckman left Caltech to become the full-time president of National Technical Laboratories.  By 1940, Beckman was able to take out a
loan to build his own 12,000 sq ft factory in South Pasadena. 

Spectrophotometry
Ultraviolet
In 1940, the equipment needed to measure light energy in the visible spectrum could cost a laboratory as much as $3,000, a huge amount at that time. There was also growing interest in examining ultraviolet spectra beyond that range. Just as Beckman had
created a single easy-to-use instrument for measuring pH, he made it a goal to create an easy-to-use instrument for spectrophotometry. Beckman's research team, led by Howard Cary, developed several models. 

The new spectrophotometers used a prism to separate light into its absorption spectrum and a phototube to electrically measure the light energy across the spectrum. They allowed the user to plot the light absorption spectrum of a substance, giving a
standardized "fingerprint", characteristic of a compound.  With Beckman's model D, later known as the DU spectrophotometer, National Technical Labs successfully provided the first easy-to-use single instrument containing both the optical and electronic
components needed for ultraviolet-absorption spectrophotometry.  The user could insert a sample, dial up the desired wavelength of light, and read the amount of absorption of that frequency from a simple meter. It produced accurate absorption spectra
in both the ultraviolet and the visible regions of the spectrum with relative ease and repeatable accuracy. The National Bureau of Standards ran tests to certify that the DU's results were accurate and repeatable and recommended its use. 

Beckman's DU spectrophotometer has been referred to as the "model T" of scientific instruments: "This device forever simplified and streamlined chemical analysis, by allowing researchers to perform a 99.9% accurate quantitative measurement of a substance
within minutes, as opposed to the weeks required previously for results of only 25% accuracy." Theodore L. Brown notes that it "revolutionized the measurement of light signals from samples".  Nobel laureate Bruce Merrifield is quoted as calling the DU
spectrophotometer "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience."

Development of the spectrophotometer also had direct relevance to the war effort. For example, the role of vitamins in health was being studied, and scientists wanted to identify Vitamin A-rich foods to keep soldiers healthy. Previous methods involved
feeding rats for several weeks, then performing a biopsy to estimate Vitamin A levels. The DU spectrophotometer yielded better results in a matter of minutes. The DU spectrophotometer was also an important tool for scientists studying and producing the
new wonder drug penicillin. By the end of the war, American pharmaceutical companies were producing 650 billion units of penicillin each month. Much of the work done in this area during WWII was kept secret until after the war.

Infrared
Beckman and his company were involved in a number of secret projects. There was a critical shortage of rubber, which was used in jeep and airplane tires and in tanks. Natural sources from the Far East were unavailable because of the war, and scientists
sought a reliable synthetic substitute. Beckman was approached by the Office of Rubber Reserve about developing an infrared spectrophotometer to aid in the study of chemicals such as toluene and butadiene. The Office of Rubber Reserve met secretly in
Detroit with Robert Brattain of the Shell Development Co., Arnold O. Beckman, and R. Bowling Barnes of American Cyanamid. Beckman was asked to secretly produce a hundred infrared spectrophotometers to be used by authorized govt scientists, based on a
design for a single-beam spectrophotometer which had already been developed by Robert Brattain for Shell.  The result was the Beckman IR-1 spectrophotometer.

By September 1942, the first of the instruments was being shipped. Approximately 75 IR-1s were made between 1942 and 1945 for use by the US synthetic-rubber effort. The researchers were not allowed to publish or discuss anything related to the new
machines until after the war. Other researchers who were independently pursuing the development of infrared spectrometry, were able to publish and to develop instruments during this time without being affected by secrecy restrictions.

Beckman had continued to develop the infrared spectrophotometer after the release of the IR-1. Facing stiff competition, he decided in 1953 to go forward with a radical redesign of the instrument. The result was the IR-4, which could be operated using
either a single or double beam of infrared light.  This allowed a user to take both the reference measurement and the sample measurement at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Beckman

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