Abstract
DR. WILLIAM F. HILLEBRAND, chief chemist of the United States Bureau of Standards, died on February 7 at the age of seventy-one years, and an appreciative account of his life and work by a colleague at the Bureau of Standards has been published in a recent issue of Science. William Francis Hillebrand spent two years at Cornell University before taking up chemistry, most of his training in which was received in Europe. In 1872 he went to Heidelberg to study under Bunsen and Kirchhoff, and from there, he and T. H. Norton published in 1875 their paper on the preparation of metallic cerium, lanthanum, and the mixture then called didymium. Hillebrand's later work showed these metals were trivalent and belonged to the rare earth group. He also discovered the pyrophoric properties of cerium filings. From Heidelberg Dr. Hillebrand went to Strassburg under Fittig, and from there to the Mining Academy at Freiburg. Returning to the United States, he was appointed to the staff of the Geological Survey in 1880, and until 1885 was stationed at Denver. Here was plenty of mineral material to exercise his growing skill as an analyst, and the work was continued after his transfer to Washington. In 1908 he became second chief of the Bureau of Standards. Dr. Hillebrand devised general analytical procedures suitable for different types of mineral and rock, and also special methods for the determination of individual elements, which were placed on record in various issues of the Bulletin of the Geological Survey; silicate rocks were dealt with in 1897, carbonate rocks in 1907, both of which were quickly translated into German. Dr. Hillebrand was a member of the.National Academy of Sciences, and in 1906 was president of the American Chemical Society; for many years he served as an associate-editor of this Society's Journal and also of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.
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[Obituaries]. Nature 115, 468 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/115468b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/115468b0