Theodore William Richards (1868-1928)

American chemist born in Germantown, PA, he took his undergraduate education at Haverford College (1885) and Harvard (1886). After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1888, he studied at Gottingen, Leipzig and Dresden. He was an Assistant Professor at Harvard from 1894 to 1901 and Professor of Chemistry from 1901 to 1928. He is best known for his careful work in the determination of atomic weights and made, with his students, accurate revisions of the atomic weights of some 60 elements. His other interests included research on atomic volume, compressibility, molecular forces, thermochemistry, electrochemistry, and thermodynamics. He invented a calorimeter for the precise measurement of heat quantities and also an instrument for the measurement of low concentrations of precipitates by light scattering. Richards was awarded in 1915 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1914 for his accurate determinations of the atomic weights of many of the elements.