Willard Libby

Willard Frank Libby (December 17, 1908 – September 8, 1980) was an American physical chemist noted for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology and palaeontology.

Willard Frank Libby was born in Parachute, Colorado, on December 17, 1908, the son of farmers Ora Edward Libby and his wife Eva May (née Rivers).

He had two brothers, Elmer and Raymond, and two sisters, Eva and Evelyn.

Libby began his education in a two-room Colorado schoolhouse.

When he was five, Libby's parents moved to Santa Rosa, California.

He attended Analy High School, in Sebastopol, from which he graduated in 1926.

Libby, who grew to be 6 ft tall, played tackle on the high school football team.

In 1927 he entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his BS in 1931, and his PhD in 1933, writing his doctoral thesis on the "Radioactivity of ordinary elements, especially samarium and neodymium: method of detection" under the supervision of Wendell Mitchell Latimer.

Independently of the work of George de Hevesy and Max Pahl, he discovered that the natural long-lived isotopes of samarium primarily decay by emission of alpha particles.

He spent the 1930s building sensitive Geiger counters to measure weak natural and artificial radioactivity.

A 1931 chemistry graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his doctorate in 1933, he studied radioactive elements and developed sensitive Geiger counters to measure weak natural and artificial radioactivity.

During World War II he worked in the Manhattan Project's Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories at Columbia University, developing the gaseous diffusion process for uranium enrichment.

After the war, Libby accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, where he developed the technique for dating organic compounds using carbon-14.

He also discovered that tritium similarly could be used for dating water, and therefore wine.

Libby was appointed Instructor in the department of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1933.

He became an assistant professor of chemistry there in 1938.

He joined Berkeley's chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma in 1941.

That year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and elected to work at Princeton University.

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, Libby volunteered his services to Nobel Prize laureate Harold Urey.

Urey arranged for Libby to be given leave from the University of California, Berkeley and to join him at Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project, the wartime project to develop atomic bombs, at what became its Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories.

During his time in the New York City area, Libby was a resident of Leonia, New Jersey.

Over the next three years, Libby worked on the gaseous diffusion process for uranium enrichment.

An atomic bomb required fissile material, and the fissile uranium-235 made up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium.

The SAM Laboratories therefore had to find a way of separating kilograms of it from the more abundant uranium-238.

Gaseous diffusion worked on the principle that a lighter gas diffuses through a barrier faster than a heavier one at a rate inversely proportional to its molecular weight.

But the only known gas containing uranium was the highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride, and a suitable barrier was hard to find.

Through 1942, Libby and his team studied different barriers and the means to protect them from corrosion from the uranium hexafluoride.

The most promising type was a barrier made of powdered nickel developed by Edward O. Norris of the Jelliff Manufacturing Corporation and Edward Adler from the City College of New York, which became known as the "Norris-Adler" barrier by late 1942.

In addition to developing a suitable barrier, the SAM Laboratories also had to assist in the design of a gaseous separation plant, which became known as K-25.

Libby helped with the engineers from Kellex to produce a workable design for a pilot plant.

Libby conducted a series of tests that indicated that the Norris-Adler barrier would work, and he remained confident that with an all-out effort, the remaining problems with it could be solved.

Although doubts remained, construction work began on the K-25 full-scale production plant in September 1943.

As 1943 gave way to 1944, many problems remained.

In 1950, he became a member of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

He was appointed a commissioner in 1954, becoming its sole scientist.

He sided with Edward Teller on pursuing a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb, participated in the Atoms for Peace program, and defended the administration's atmospheric nuclear testing.

Libby resigned from the AEC in 1959 to become professor of chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a position he held until his retirement in 1976.

For his contributions to the team that developed this process, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.

In 1962, he became the director of the University of California statewide Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP).

He started the first Environmental Engineering program at UCLA in 1972, and as a member of the California Air Resources Board, he worked to develop and improve California's air pollution standards.