Career
After receiving his doctorate, Noyes taught a year as an instructor at the University of Minnesota. He was next a professor of chemistry at the University of Tennessee, followed by seventeen years at Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana (starting there in 1886). In 1903, Noyes was hired as the first "Chief Chemist" for the United States National Bureau of Standards in Baltimore, Maryland. His determination of atomic weights lead to "one of the most precise chemical determinations ever made", the ratio of the masses of hydrogen to oxygen (which he found to be 1.00787:16). With H.C.P. Weber, he received the Nichols Medal in 1908 for determining the atomic weight of chlorine.
In 1907 he became chair of the Chemistry Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a position he would hold until 1926. In the process, he helped it to become one of the leading departments of chemistry in the United States. Despite his earlier work in analytical chemistry, Noyes is perhaps best known as an organic chemist. He was the first to prove the structure of camphor definitively and studied rearrangements in camphor and related compounds. He also worked on "electronic theories of valence, and the valence and nature of nitrogen in nitrogen trichloride" as well as developing "methods for the determination of phosphorus, sulfur, and manganese in iron".
Read more about this topic: William A. Noyes
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)