Leif Tronstad

Leif Hans Larsen Tronstad DSO, OBE (27 March 1903 – 11 March 1945) was a Norwegian inorganic chemist, intelligence officer and military organizer.

He graduated from middle school in 1918, with top grades in mathematics.

He then embarked on thirty months of professional practice in two local electricity companies, which was a requirement to enrol at Kristiania Technical School, a predecessor of the Faculty of Engineering at Oslo University College.

When he enrolled in 1920 he chose technical chemistry instead of electronic engineering.

The records were set in 1921 and 1923, but broken by the team IL i BUL in 1926.

His brother John, a bronze medalist in 1500 metres at the 1917 Norwegian championships, was on the relay team as well.

Both brothers used their father's name Larsen at the time; Leif took up his mother's name Tronstad later.

He graduated in 1922, the best chemistry student; a fellow student recalled that he "did not have to read anything more than once" in order to remember it.

In the spring of 1923, he also took the examen artium after attending the Haagaas School for one year.

He was ready to enroll at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, but waited one year, possibly wanting to strengthen his personal finances.

In the meantime, he started on his compulsory military service.

He was an accomplished athlete and helped his hometown club Grane SK to two Norwegian 4 × 1500 metres relay records.

In 1924 Tronstad moved to Trondheim to study at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, graduating in 1927.

His graduation paper was deemed exceptional and as such was reported to King Haakon of Norway.

He graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1927 and was a prolific researcher and writer of academic publications.

Tronstad had taken various stray jobs while studying, and also finished his military service, reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Norwegian Army Corps of Weaponry in 1927.

From 1927 to 1928 Tronstad worked briefly as an assistant at the Norwegian Institute of Technology as well as in a private company in Kristiansand.

Regarded as a fully-fledged academic work, it was published scientifically in 1928.

In 1928 he returned to the Norwegian Institute of Technology as a research fellow.

In the same year, Tronstad married Edla Obel, who was nine years his junior, in Trondheim.

The couple had two children.

Tronstad spent the first year of a research period as an assistant to Herbert Freundlich in Dahlem, Berlin.

He studied the passivity of metal surfaces, and made a breakthrough when he managed to measure extremely thin oxide surface coatings, thus solving a problem dating from the time of Michael Faraday.

He continued to Stockholm to study metallography under Carl Benedicks, and to elaborate further on his results from Berlin.

The work was completed in 1931 and his thesis, spanning 250 pages, was published in German as Optische Untersuchungen zur Frage der Passivität des Eisens und Stahls.

For it, he received the doctorate degree.

He was hired at the Norwegian Institute of Technology as a lecturer in the summer of 1931, although he spent the first year at the University of Cambridge, conducting further research with a scholarship from a memorial fund of Christian Michelsen.

The research at Cambridge was a continuation of his thesis work, but this time he tested his method on mercury.

A professor of chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1936, he was among the pioneers of heavy water research, and was instrumental when a heavy water plant was built at Vemork.

After the invasion of Norway by Germany during World War II, Tronstad conducted domestic resistance for one year before fleeing the country for England.

There, he gathered valuable intelligence from Norwegian sources, both on the development of the V-2 rocket and the growing German interest in heavy water.

Following the death in 1934 of a professor of technical inorganic chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Tronstad was appointed his successor on 17 April 1936, effective from 1 May.

At the time, he was one of the youngest professors in Norway.

In 1943 Tronstad planned Operation Gunnerside, in which the German access to heavy water processing at Vemork was severely impeded.

His information about the V-2 rocket contributed to the massive Allied bombing of Peenemünde.

For a long time Tronstad had wanted to return to Norway to organize resistance work, however he was prevented by the Norwegian military authorities in Britain.

In 1944, he did travel to Norway, to organize Operation Sunshine, for the defence of Norwegian infrastructure.

After five months in the country, he was killed in action after his team had taken the local bailiff hostage.

Tronstad was born in Bærum; the son of Hans Larsen and Josefine Amalie Tronstad, Hans died three months before Leif was born.

Leif thus grew up in Sandvika with his mother and four siblings.