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Jaroslav Heyrovský and Polarography
The name of Jaroslav Heyrovský is unambiguously connected with polarography, the electrochemical method he introduced and to the development of which he dedicated his whole life. The Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1959 came as an apt appreciation of this single-minded devotion.
Jaroslav Heyrovský, called Jaro in the family, was born on 20th December 1890 in Prague which is now in the Czech Republic, then capital of Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had three sisters and one brother and their father was a university professor of Roman Law. The two boys, from their childhood were keenly interested in nature. They collected interesting natural objects and kept a tame squirrel at home, which they had found injured in a forest. Leo, the younger brother, later became one of the leading Czech entomologists. Of the school subjects, Jaro preferred mathematics and physics (chemistry was not taught at that time in secondary schools in Prague) and read books on astronomy. He was strongly impressed by William Ramsay’s discovery of the rare gas elements when this was internationally publicised in connection with Ramsay’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1904. This gave him the idea that physical chemistry was the subject that he would like to pursue. However, this subject was not yet established at the Prague Charles University, and so after the first year of study of chemistry in Prague, Jaro begged his father to allow him to continue his studies at the University College in London where William Ramsay was the head of the chemistry department.
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article (111 Kb)Michael Heyrovský, son of J Heyrovský, is in the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic. His broad research interests include physical chemistry, particularly electrochemistry related to various processes on mercury electrodes.
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