Bancroft, Wilder Dwight

Bancroft, Wilder Dwight

(b. Middletown, Rhode Island, 1 October 1867: d. Ithaca, New York, 7 February 1953)

chemistry.

Bancroft was descended from an early New England family, his grandfather being George Bancroft the historian, secretary of the navy under James K. Polk, and founder of the United States Naval Academy. He became interested in chemistry at Harvard, where he received the B.A. in 1888 and assisted in the chemistry department in 1888–1889. He then journeyed to Europe and studied at Strasbourg; Berlin; Leipzig, where he received the Ph.D. under Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892; and Amsterdam, where he studied under van’t Hoff. On returning to the United States, Bancroft taught at Harvard from 1893 to 1895 and at Cornell from 1895 to 1937. During World War I he joined the Chemical Warfare Service with the rank of lieutenant colonel. His ability in science, coupled with his good judgment in administrative matters, led his professional colleagues to elect him president of the American Chemical Society in 1910, and of the American Electrochemical Society in 1905 and 1919. In 1937 on the Cornell campus an automobile struck him, injuring him so severely that he was a semi-invalid for the remainder of his life.

Bancroft was one of the early physical chemists in the United States. He taught physical chemistry at Cornell, trained graduate students, wrote a text entitled The Phase Rule (1897), and founded the Journal of Physical Chemistry in 1896. He supported the Journal financially, coedited it until 1909, and edited it until 1932, when he gave it to the American Chemical Society. The value of the Journal in its early years lay not only in the information it transmitted, but also in the stimulus it gave to the study of physical and colloid chemistry in the United States.

In research Bancroft did not follow one line exhaustively, but preferred to roam into many fields, letting his curiosity lead him. Generally he had a number of investigations going on at one time. His early investigations were in electrochemistry, a subject he pursued into the practical field of electro deposition of metals, At the same time he and his students took up the study of heterogeneous equilibria, which was then in an early stage of development, and applied the phase rule to a great variety of systems. They investigated freezing-point equilibria in three component systems; showed that the minimum in boiling-point curves of binary liquid mixtures was caused by association of one or both components; and made intelligible the heterogeneous solid-liquid equilibria encountered in dynamic isomerides.

Bancroft’s second specialty was colloid chemistry. His early work on emulsions and the chemistry of photography led him into theories of dyeing, of the color of colloids, and, toward the end of his career, of the colloidal phenomena associated with anesthesia, asthma, insanity, and drug addiction.

Through his writings on contact catalysis, Bancroft clarified what was, around 1920, largely an empirical art and stimulated chemists to carry out investigations that placed the art on a firm theoretical foundation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bancroft’s writings include The Phase Rule (Ithaca, N.Y., 1897); Applied Colloid Chemistrty; General Theory (New York, 1921; 3rd ed., 1932); and Research Problems in Colloid Chemistry (Washington, D.C., 1921). Bancroft’s articles, of which there are scores, may be found by reference to Chemical Abstracts.

II.Secondary Literature. Articles on Bancroft are A. Findlay, “Wilder Dwight Bancroft, 1867–1953,” in Journal of the Chemical Society (London) (1953), 2506–2514, with portrait, also in Eduard Farber, ed., Great Chemists (New York, 1961), pp. 1245–1261;H. W. Gillett, “Wilder D. Bancroft,” in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 24 (1932), 1200–1201; and C. W. Mason, “Wilder Dwight Bancroft, 1867–1953,” in Journal of the American Chemical Society. 76 (1954), 2601–2602, with portrait.

Wyndham Davies Miles