Jaroslav Heyrovsky | Biography

Jaroslav Heyrovsky was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic) on December 20, 1890, to Leopold, a professor of Roman law at Charles University in Prague, and Klára (Hanl) Heyrovsky. It was during his years at the gymnasium (high school) in Prague that Heyrovsky developed a deep interest in mathematics and physics. By the time he entered the Charles University in 1909, his father had become rector of the college. Heyrovsky studied physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Charles, becoming influenced by physicists Frantisek Záviska and Bohumil Kucera. He also studied with chemist Bohumil Brauner, an association that led him in 1910 to University College in London, where he received his bachelor of science degree in 1913.

Frederick G. Donnan had succeeded William Ramsay at University College and stimulated Heyrovsky's interest in electrochemistry, which became the subject of his doctoral studies. He was detained in Prague, however, during a visit home at the onset of World War I. Although poor health had exempted him for military service, he was assigned to a military hospital as a chemist and radiologist between 1914 and 1918. Continuing his research despite the war, he presented his doctoral thesis on the electroaffinity of aluminum in the fall of 1918 to Charles University. In 1919 he became an assistant professor of chemistry there, and in 1920, was appointed lecturer.

Heyrovsky published articles from his thesis, and these earned him a second doctorate from University College in 1921. By 1922, he was appointed associate professor and head of the chemistry department at Charles University, and in 1924, he was named extraordinary professor and director of a new establishment, the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Charles. He held the position of full professor from 1926 until 1950, when he was named director of the Polarographic Institute of Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Among his many associates and collaborators, Masuzo Shikata was instrumental in helping Heyrovsky develop the polarograph, a piece of scientific equipment used to quickly and efficiently determine the composition of a solution. They published a description of the instrument they had designed, detailing how it automatically records the analysis of chemical solutions without altering them. This was one of the earliest laboratory instruments to help automate research. The two researchers had devised a method that reduced the process from over an hour to fifteen or twenty minutes. His work in this area is considered to have greatly aided the study of electrode processes, applications of which are useful in medicine and industry as well as in the research of biochemical reactions and the study of electrochemical processes of organic and inorganic compounds. In later work, Heyrovsky was able to reduce the recording time of the process to fractions of seconds with great accuracy.

A Rockefeller Fellowship made it possible for Heyrovsky to lecture at the University of Paris in 1926. The successful presentation of his work led to lectures on the polarographic process in the United States, notably at Berkeley in 1933 under a Carnegie visiting professorship. In 1934 he addressed the Mendeleev centenary in Leningrad. This worldwide recognition was aided, according to Heyrovsky, by the help of Wilhelm Böttger in 1936. Böttger was the editor of an important chemical journal and invited Heyrovsky to contribute an account on polarography for the second volume of his compendium on analytical methods in physical chemistry. During the 1940s, accounts of his discoveries were published in English and in German.

During World War II, Heyrovsky's research continued in the midst of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Heyrovsky was permitted to carry on his work, and by the end of the war, he had completed important writing and begun new investigations.

Heyrovsky believed that it was vital to Czech scientific culture that a journal be published in his native language. He was helped by the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences to found a chemical journal for papers that had been written in French or English. Heyrovsky accepted responsibility for translations of the English papers, while his associate, Emil Votocek, handled the French papers. The publication, Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications, became internationally recognized. Heyrovsky also prepared a number of bibliographies on polarography with the help of a number of notable associates, including his wife, Marie Heyrovská.

Czech society was grateful for the work that Heyrovsky did to reflect how the country's scientific community had matured. Specifically, he had created many Czech scientific terms in the belief that language was a critical tool in the development of research. In recognition, the Polarographic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (founded as the Polarographic Institute at Charles University in 1950), was named the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Polarography in 1964. Additionally, he was awarded the Czech State Prize in 1951 and the Order of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1955. He received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1959.

Heyrovsky married Marie Koránova in 1926. They had a daughter, Jitka, who became a biochemist and a son, Michael, who followed his father to the Institute of Polarography. Heyrovsky died in Prague on March 27, 1967.