Elton John. Rod Stewart. See more Must Read on Smooth. James Morrison facts: Who is his wife, what are his biggest songs, and how old is he? Picture: Getty. View this post on Instagram. I graduated in He influenced me to come to Australia and then he also became a member of this academy.
In my first year, I discovered that you could find hydrogen atoms by X-ray crystallography. I did manage to find it! I think this must have impressed JM because he almost at once gave me an assistantship—a very junior post in the university. In those days to get an X-ray structure it needed huge calculations.
So, to get a single structure, it would take you, oh, up to six months to do it. Well, I had kept up with Christine. I went to see JM to see what he thought about getting married.
It had already dawned on me that good jobs in Britain went to Oxbridge graduates and all the rest were second-raters.
At that time, from to , the weather in Scotland had been dreadful. It was mist and rain all the time and the sun never shone in Glasgow. They became friends with us and they showed us a book of pictures of sunlit Australian beaches, which had a tremendous impression on us in Scotland. Then, in , we had a visit to the lab of a little chap, Ian Wark, who told us about a new lab he was setting up in Melbourne.
Sandy Mathieson and I were very impressed by Ian Wark. We thought he sounded like a good sort of fellow. CSIR was the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and it had been set up in to carry out research in primary and secondary industry. But Ian Wark had been put in charge of chemistry and he set up a section, which later became a division called Chemical Physics, and this is the one that I was to join.
In the s, chemistry and physics were taught in the universities but were pretty well mutually exclusive. You either did a degree in chemistry or you did a degree in physics. He was fortunate to find another young fellow called Lloyd Rees, to set up this new section. What Ian then did was to invest in all the latest pieces of physical instrumentation of all sorts and then set about finding young men who would come to do something with these instruments and see how they would turn out.
There were not many of us in that section. All of these were very successful. Sandy had come out to do X-ray crystallography. The only place where you could find such things was where there was lots of money, which were oil companies and governments. One huge mass spectrometer had been built in America—in fact, not just one; I think they built several huge mass spectrometers called calutrons in order to separate uranium from uranium to make the first atom bomb.
At that time the United States government had placed an embargo on mass spectrometers. Well, not quite. I once did a few calculations just to see and I reckoned it would have taken me , years to produce enough U to make us a successful bomb. So I think they were a little bit overworried about it. He also discovered that these particles could be deflected in a magnetic field and that heavier particles were deflected less than light particles, like hydrogen.
Hydrogen particles were deflected very easily and the heavier atoms less so. So, by that means, he discovered that there were two kinds of neon. Here he suddenly found two neons, one at mass 20 and one at mass 22, which they called isotopes. Aston built what are called mass spectrographs, where they used photographic plates to detect the ions, whilst Dempster used electrical methods of detection to produce what are called the mass spectrometers. By , these machines had been made with a mass resolution of about one in That is, you could separate atoms with masses up to molecular weight , which was just enough to separate the uranium for the atom bomb.
But like radar and so many discoveries that were made in England, the commercial applications of it took place in America. In fact, this was where commercial mass spectrometers, while there were very few, were being produced at that time.
There was a little more to it than that because they were very difficult machines to get working at all. You see, they have to have a high vacuum and the vacuum pumps that we had were very primitive. They used a lot of electronics—and, in those days, electronics itself was a black art. As a result, I think there were only 25 of us in the world who had mass spectrometers and we all became very close friends.
Unlike today, where somehow people are all out for themselves, in those days we helped each other with advice on how to keep your machine working. So, for chemistry, what could one do? If you take an atom and ionise it, all you get is the atom with a plus charge on it. If you had a more complicated molecule, nearly every chemical bond broke and you got this pattern of ions, which we call a mass spectrum. Here again, these were very characteristic and could be used for identification.
My first job was just to study how ions are made and see if we could produce reproducible mass spectra. So these mass spectra are essentially a graph with particular lines showing the different fragments. When you put a molecule into the mass spectrometer, some of the molecules just produce an ion with the plus charge and some of them break bonds so that you get all these various fragments. The mass spectrum comes out as a piece of paper with a list of peak heights versus mass number, which is characteristic of a given molecule.
So his chemists had separated out the breath of Granny Smiths and sent it to us and we put it in the mass spectrometer. It was a bit of a job because one drawback to a mass spectrometer is that a sample has to be pure.
So trying to interpret it was rather like trying to solve two sets of jigsaw puzzle bits that had been tipped out into the one tray, and sorting out which was which was quite difficult. But, even so, we managed to find out that the apple breath consisted of a mixture of esters and some ethylene, which apparently made the food preservation folk very happy.
So the esters are what give the green apples their smell and the ethylene is what makes them ripen. Ethylene has since been found to be very effective for food ripening.
If you have ethylene gas given off by one fruit, it will make all the other fruit in its neighbourhood start to ripen. So what were the challenges? Obviously it was much more complicated with all these fragments and different masses and so on to put it all together to deduce what molecules were in the gas. First of all we had to discover what was the mechanism of ion impact. To make an ion, you have to bombard the molecules with a beam of electrons.
When you do this, first of all, if the energy is low, you just produce the molecular ion. Then, as the energy gets a little bit more, you break the weakest bond in the molecule. Well, I thought it would be a wonderful way to measure bond energies. By varying the energy of the electrons, you could control them in this way: gradually, as you find the weakest bond and break it, you find that fragment and so on. It turned out to be a bit more complicated than that because none of the thresholds were sharp, for example.
They all seemed to start off with a slow curve that rose up from a threshold, and we had to find out what it was about the impact process that did this. So I spent years trying to build monoenergetic electron sources, where you got a beam of electrons with one energy.
So that the mass spectra are sharper lines rather than broader peaks which overlap and confuse the issue? Yes, and we built a lot of electronics. So in this process you made some important contributions to this discipline. What was the effect of this on your international reputation?
In , I was very fortunate to be awarded a Harkness Fellowship—in those days, it was called the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship—which was a wonderful opportunity to go to America for a year. He always told me that it was the most wonderful year of his life. They sent me to the University of Chicago. However, as a graduate student, Mark had worked with Al Nier and Dempster on the Manhattan Project, building these huge mass spectrometers, making the atom bomb.
That even had a story connected with it. It had resolutions of one in 4,, which meant you could go up to much higher molecular weights. It had vacua at 10, times better than what we had in our old machines. No more glass and black wax; it was made with argon arc welded inconel and held together with gaskets of pure gold. It was wonderful. We built a machine there in Chicago, using photons to produce our ionisation instead of electrons.
My machine now had a resolution of one in 5, Because carbon monoxide CO , nitrogen NO 2 and ethylene C 2 H 4 are all nominally mass 28 but because of the tiny differences in isotopic masses, are not whole numbers.
I was still trying to get monoenergetic electrons, and here is where I had another idea. And there is a principle in electronics called negative feedback, which means that a circuit that you think will do one thing will do exactly the opposite. What the spread in electron energy did was to mess up my curves by smearing them out; so I smeared them even more and then tried to use the principles of negative feedback to cancel this out—and, to my absolute astonishment, it worked.
Yes, to unsmear them. It took an enormous calculation. This is a very important theoretical contribution to the business, not only building better and better mass spectrometers; you also improved the techniques theoretically. This technique was called deconvolution. This technique has turned out to be very successful. With this advance, another important contribution to mass spectrometry, your international reputation grew and you got some very good offers overseas.
In , I think, in what was really the highlight of my career, I was invited to give a talk about my work at the Solvay Conference. This is a most unusual conference. There was I, having to go and give my talk to them.
That was, as I say, a marvellous experience for me, to meet all these people. Then, in , I was invited as a visiting professor at Princeton to continue my work. But they did have a marvellous computer, which had all of 32K of memory, which at that time was a tremendous advance. So I did a lot of computation, with some help from experts there, and wrote programs to identify mass spectra. More importantly we wrote a program which allowed you to show where the ions went to, when they went into a mixture of electric and magnetic fields.
This developed into our suite called SIMION, which has been very widely used since in the design of mass spectrometers. So you really were one of the pioneers introducing computational methods into chemistry.
Well, in a way. Nowadays, you can do wonderful things with computers. I should have shown you, when I was using CSIRAC, that was an enormous machine I forget how many kilowatts of power it used but nowadays you can buy a little chip for about two dollars which will do the whole job for you.
Australia was one of the leaders at the time, back in the lates, s. My family and I loved it at Princeton; it was a beautiful place. We had many job offers in America but there were problems in American life. We talked it over with the family and my wife and I decided that Australia was a far better place to bring up children than America. So we came back. At that time, about or so, we heard that there was a new university being set up in Melbourne called La Trobe, and I was offered a foundation chair in chemistry.
That was an eye-opener for me because learning was not the sole purpose of a university; I also got an education in university politics. In CSIRO, we had been a collection of gentlemen; suddenly, when you got into a university environment, it was boots and all.
A real eye-opener to me as to what life in the raw was like! Yes, you had to compete for just about everything; but I managed somehow. We still had this disadvantage. What was, I think, the most wonderful breakthrough in chemistry at that time was the invention by two fellows called Martin and Synge of the gas chromatograph, which was very simple.
They got a Nobel Prize for it, but it was an extremely simple device. It was a length of glass tubing about, eight feet two metres long, about an eighth of an inch three millimetres in diameter and it was filled with dust. Any old dust would do; powdered brick dust would do in the first experiments.
If you put a sample of a mixture at one end of this tube and then started to flow hydrogen gas through it, they discovered that molecules of different molecular weights travelled through this tube at different speeds.
So that, at the other end of the pipe, you could collect them one after another as they came out over a period of time. So the effect of this was that, in a mixed gas sample, the constituents would emerge one after another, separated in time but they still had to be identified. You still had to collect these samples one by one, as they came out of the end of the pipe, and then put them into your mass spectrometer. We spent several years in trying to find ways of joining the outlet pipe of the gas chromatograph on to the inlet of our mass spectrometer.
A very steady seller for well over a year, Songs… received positive acclaim, triple-platinum sales in the UK and a top fifty placement in the US. Evoking a brand of classic soul with great lyrics this is James at his best. At the time of writing James is busy working on his fourth disc. Here is his overview.
Which is why I just wanted to really kind of seize the opportunity and really enjoy it… So yeah, I would say it has definitely helped having the kind of tough upbringing I had. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
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