Richard Kleeman, from farm boy at 13, in South Australia's Barossa Valley, adds to search for atomic structure
Richard Kleeman (sitting, second from left) with a group of physics research students (and Professor J.J. Thomson) at Cambridge University in 1907. William Bragg (top right), professor of pure and applied mathematics (and physics) at Adelaide University had arranged for Kleeman's special admission to the university. Kleeman helped Bragg in important research towards the structure of atoms. Bottom right: Kleeman's own major scientific work: A Kinetic Theory of Gases and Liquids (1920).
Main image courtesy Wikipedia
Richard Kleeman. who left school at 13 to work on his family’s farm in the South Australia’s Barossa Valley, became an important support in the support phase toward Adelaide University professor William Bragg winning the Nobel Prize for physics.
Born in 1875 at Rowlands Flat, Kleeman was eldest of nine children of native-born German-Lutheran-ancestry parents, farmer Christoph Daniel Kleemann, and wife Johanna Elenore (née Munchenber). At 13, Richard Kleeman (as he generally spelt his name), left school to work on the family farm and, in 1893, was an apprenticed cooper at Yalumba winery before working in that trade at Chateau Tanunda distillery until 1901. Meanwhile, he also read mathematics and physics privately, helped by his Lutheran pastor.
In 1897, Kleeman began sending short papers to William Bragg, Adelaide University’s professor of pure and applied mathematics, also instructing in physics. An impressed Bragg arranged for Kleeman to have special admission to Adelaide University. where he completed a bachelor of science (1905), with first class honours in physics.
An evening lecturer and demonstrator in physics at the university in 1904-05, Kleeman also assisted Bragg in his pioneering studies of radioactivity: Bragg included him as joint author on three papers. They discovered that alpha particles emitted from particular radioactive substances always had the same energy. This gave a new way of identifying and classifying radioactive substances and would yield important clues about atoms’ structure. Bragg mailed their results to radiochemist and future Nobel Prize winner Frederick Soddy at Glasgow University and he had them published in Philosophical Magazine.
Kleeman was awarded an 1851 Exhibition research scholarship to study science in 1905-08 in England at Cambridge University, where he also completed a bachelor of arts degree in 1907. Also at Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford, a pioneering researcher in atomic and nuclear physics, reported that Kleeman had published “five important papers” after “unusually good work”.
In 1908, Kleeman shared the Emmanuel College Sudbury-Hardyman prize for his dissertation and was awarded his science doctorate by Adelaide University. Kleeman held a Mackinnon studentship of the Royal Society, London, in 1909-11 and shared the Clark Maxwell scholarship at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1910-13, continuing research at Cambridge. Renewing his work with Bragg at Leeds University, in 1909, he produced two papers on the ionisation of gases. Kleeman also published prolifically on radioactivity and on radiation interacting with matter and on the subject of his later major work, A Kinetic Theory of Gases and Liquids (New York, 1920).
In 1908-09 and 1912-13, Kleeman unsuccessfully applied for professorial positions in several countries. He was bitterly disappointed not to win the foundation chair of mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia. In 1911, he visited Australia on holiday and, in 1912, at the parish church, Woburn Square, London, he married Bertha Pauline Martin of Adelaide.
In 1914, Kleeman travelled to the United States of America and his wife followed the next year. In 1915, Kleeman became an assistant professor (1914-20) and associate professor (1920-27) of physics at Union College, Schenectady, New York. From 1919 to 1927, he was also a consulting physicist at the General Electric Company of New York. He later developed his 1920 book’s themes, focussing initially on the electrical and magnetic properties of atoms and molecules in gases and liquids. In 1927, he left the college and did private research, doing theoretical studies of the properties of substances at the absolute zero temperature. He died of pneumonia in 1932 in the Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan, New York.
