Obit: Arnold Beckman

[Spehro Pefhany]

Arnold O. Beckman, the scientific visionary whose inventions
transformed chemistry and made him so wealthy that he became one of
the country's major philanthropists, died Tuesday. He was 104.

....

Beckman earned 14 patents, including those for the potentiometer, a
variable electrical resistor similar to the volume knob on a radio,
and the spectrophotometer, which allowed scientists to quickly
determine the chemical makeup of a compound by measuring the intensity
of various wavelengths in a spectrum of light.

But it was one of his first -- U.S. Patent No. 2,058,761 -- that
earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron,
Ohio: the pH meter, a simple device that measured the sourness in
lemons.


http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-beckman19may19,1,5646673.story?coll=la-home-headlines


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

[Mike]

Arnold O. Beckman, the scientific visionary whose inventions
transformed chemistry and made him so wealthy that he became one of
the country's major philanthropists, died Tuesday. He was 104.

Arnold distributed his wealth widely in Orange County. I was thinking about
him on Saturday as I drove past the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Research
Center at UCI, and wondering what he was up to now. Some years ago, Arnold
said that he and Mabel would like to run out of breath and money at the
same time. Not such a bad goal, really. I wonder how close he came...

-- Mike --

 

[Winfield Hill]

Mike wrote...

Arnold distributed his wealth widely in Orange County. I was thinking about
him on Saturday as I drove past the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Research
Center at UCI, and wondering what he was up to now. Some years ago, Arnold
said that he and Mabel would like to run out of breath and money at the
same time. Not such a bad goal, really. I wonder how close he came...

R.I.P.

Thanks,
- Win

(email: use hill_at_rowland-dot-org for now)

 

[CFoley1064]

Subject: Obit: Arnold Beckman

From: Spehro Pefhany [email protected]
Date: 5/18/2004 10:35 PM Central Standard Time
Message-id: <[email protected]>

Arnold O. Beckman, the scientific visionary whose inventions
transformed chemistry and made him so wealthy that he became one of
the country's major philanthropists, died Tuesday. He was 104.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

"He was a man, all in all. We shall not see his like again." - W. Shakespeare

Among other things, his philanthropy included the establishment of the Beckman
Institute at the University of Illinois.

http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/aobdeath.html

Chris

 

[Tim Shoppa]

Arnold distributed his wealth widely in Orange County. I was thinking about
him on Saturday as I drove past the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Research
Center at UCI, and wondering what he was up to now.

Caltech has *many* buildings with Beckman in the name.

Tim.

 

[Mike]

Caltech has *many* buildings with Beckman in the name.

I underestimated the geographic diversity of his philanthropy. The Orange
County Register listed some of the beneficiaries this morning: Caltech,
University of Illinois, Stanford, UC Irvine, UC San Francisco, Cal State
Fullerton, Rockefeller University, Chapman University, the Scripps Clinic
and the City of Hope. His gifts were estimated to total $400 million.

-- Mike --