Theodor Svedberg

Biography

In 1925 the student magazine Ergo organised an exhibition in Uppsala, and among the participants was Theodor Svedberg, professor of physical chemistry. He painted views of Swedish places and of the countries he visited, in oil, tempera and watercolour. In 1948 he showed several paintings with South American subjects at the student salon.

He had begun to paint in his youth.

Svedberg was born on 30 August 1884 at the Fleräng estate in Valbo parish, near Gävle. His father, Elias Svedberg, managed an ironworks, and his mother was Augusta Alstermark. Part of his childhood was spent at the Älvestorp manor in Västmanland. He finished school in Örebro, where he became particularly interested in physics, chemistry and biology; botany interested him most of all, but he became a chemist because he expected it to let him look deeper into biological processes. His father allowed him to carry out experiments in the small laboratory at the ironworks. In January 1904 Svedberg entered Uppsala University. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1905, the licentiate in 1907 and the doctorate in 1908; his dissertation was titled “Studies in the Theory of Colloidal Solutions”. From 1905 he worked at the university as an assistant in chemistry, in 1907 he became a docent, and in 1912 he was appointed professor of physical chemistry. He held the chair until 1949. In the early 1920s he taught for a time at the University of Wisconsin.

His work on colloids supported the theory of Brownian motion developed by Albert Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski. For this research he created the method of analytical ultracentrifugation and showed that it could be used to tell one pure protein from another. He also built the first ultracentrifuges. In 1912 his book “Die Existenz der Moleküle” (“The Existence of Molecules”) appeared.

In 1926 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his work on disperse systems”. In his Nobel lecture he spoke of the importance the ultracentrifuge might acquire for medicine, physics, chemistry and industry. He had been elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as early as 1913. Later came election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1944), membership of the US National Academy of Sciences (1945), the Franklin Medal (1949) and honorary doctorates, among them from the Royal Institute of Technology (1944) and the Sorbonne (1950). In 1966 he became a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

His interests were wide. He was an amateur photographer and studied the photographic process seriously. In the 1920s, while photographing the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic Bible, at different wavelengths, he found that ultraviolet light made the faded text legible. He collected plants: his botanical collection was considered one of the best in Sweden. Art, too, was more than a hobby for him. At the exhibition “Signerad textil” (“Signed Textiles”), shown at the Nordiska Kompaniet department store and at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, he exhibited two printed fabrics inspired by his work on atoms and chromosomes. His tempera painting of a view of Uppsala was reproduced in 1954 in an illustrated book about the city.

In 1949, on reaching retirement age, Svedberg left his chair but by special decision kept the post of director of the Gustaf Werner Institute of Nuclear Chemistry, founded at the university shortly before. There, on his initiative, a synchrocyclotron was installed. He headed the institute until 1967. Today Uppsala has a laboratory named after him, and the unit of sedimentation rate equal to 10⁻¹³ seconds is called the svedberg (S). In 2009 a lunar crater was also named after him.

In his last years Svedberg lived in Kopparberg, where he died on 25 February 1971; he is buried there.