The Sun Chemist Read Online Free PDF Page B

staircase, and the coffee turned up presently. Later I went to see Connie along the corridor. All the files were in her room; she was the main coordinator of research. Later still, I was working in Chiamchik’s bedroom.
    I state this because it happened in this order, but in fact I was thinking all the time of Olga, popping over to Wimbledon today, and of Hopcroft, nattering convivially in the St Mary and St Joseph, and of the unknown man in Terre Haute, Indiana, who was no longer in a position to be convivial. I was delving into the acetone process during this, and into a couple of other processes.
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    Chaim Weizmann was born in 1874 in Motol, a small village in Byelorussia, and as a boy moved with his family to Pinsk, a few miles away, which was bigger and even nastier. His father was a timber merchant, not prosperous, but he managed to put all of his large family through university. There was a rather sound family way of doing this. As each child completed university , he got a job and began contributing to the tuition fees of the next in line. (Years later, while Chaimchik was pawning his compasses, or scraping a living with Verochka in Manchester, he still managed to send a pound or two a month to keep two sisters going in Switzerland.)
    He soon got away from Pinsk and went to Germany to study chemistry, ultimately to the Technische Hochschule at Berlin Charlottenburg where he worked under the immediate direction of a Dr Bistrzycki. When Bistrzycki was called to a professorship at Fribourg in Switzerland in 1896. Weizmann followed him. Hepicked up his D.Sc. there in 1899, and went to the University of Geneva as a junior lecturer.
    Dyestuff chemistry was much the thing at the time, and this is what he had been doing with Bistrzycki. He immediately began researching and publishing at a great rate. In a single year he produced three very extensive papers and took out four well-documented patents. But he was busy in a bewildering number of directions.
    Switzerland was at the time a hotbed of political activity. There were numerous groups of impassioned émigrés, mainly Russian, covering a wide spectrum of contrary opinion. There were simple Socialists, not so simple Socialists, Communists (including incipient Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Anarchists, Bundists, Zionists. The wild object of many of them was to create a revolution in unchanging Russia, and of the last group to alter an equally unchanging situation, the dispersion of the Jews.
    Zionism as a political movement was of later vintage than the others. Its basis was that the millions of Jews scattered about the world were not simply religious minorities in their different countries, as might be Protestants, Catholics, or Muslims, but a single people exiled from a particular land. The proposition was to repurchase the land, and the movement’s organizer, a Viennese journalist called Theodor Herzl (whose dignified portrait today appears on Israeli hundred-pound notes), in fact tried to do this by offering the Sultan of Turkey several million pounds for a ‘charter’ to it. The deal fell through, to the Sultan’s regret, but there were very many alternative proposals, hotly contested by the impecunious polemicists and students who made up the active body.
    Weizmann had been a Zionist for years, and in Switzerland found fertile ground and much unattached or even downright errant Jewish youth. He decided to collect what he could of it for Zionism, and with half a dozen friends arranged a meeting in the Russian library. This was a rash thing to do without securing the prior approval of G. V. Plekhanov, doyen of the squabbling émigré society and founder of Marxism in Russia. (In later life, Verochka recalled often seeing his two juniors Lenin and Trotsky meeting in a flat across the street.) Plekhanov’s disapproval could virtually be guaranteed for interlopers to his scene, so that when the founding seven arrived at their venue they found, with no surprise, that all