William A. Noyes
William Albert Noyes (* November 6, 1857 at Independence ( Iowa), † October 24, 1941 ) was an American chemist.
Noyes studied at Grinnell College in the state of Iowa, graduating in 1879 with a bachelor's degree and then taught there Analytical Chemistry. From 1881 he studied at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received his doctorate in 1882 at Ira Remsen ( On the oxidation of benzene with chromic acid). The thesis also gave him a master's degree from Grinnell College. To finance his studies, he led the way from chemical water analysis. After graduation, he was instructor at the University of Minnesota, Professor at the University of Tennessee and from 1886 professor at Rose Polytechnic Institute (now Rose- Hulman Institute of Technology) in Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1903 he was the chief chemist of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS ) in Baltimore. There he earned a reputation by very accurate determination of atomic masses. For example, he determined the ratio of the atomic mass of hydrogen to oxygen on 1,00787:16. In 1907 he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign and director of the Department of Chemistry. There he built from the chemistry faculty at one of the leading in the country and devoted himself especially in organic chemistry, for example in the determination of the structure of camphor. In 1926 he went into retirement.
From 1902 to 1917 he was editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society and in 1907 he founded the Chemical Abstracts (later Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) ), the first editor, he was until 1910. In 1924 he founded Chemical Reviews and was its first editor until 1926. After the First World War, he tried in vain to reach convergence between French and German chemists.
In 1908 he received together with the HCP Weber Nichols Medal for determining the atomic mass of chlorine. In 1935, he received the Priestley Medal in 1919 and the Willard Gibbs Medal. His son William Albert Noyes Jr. (1898-1980) from his first marriage ( Noyes was married three times ) was also a chemist and received as well as his father, the Priestley Medal and Gibbs.