JAMES FRANCK
 James
Franck was born on August 26, 1882, in Hamburg, Germany. After
attending the Wilhelm Gymnasium there, he studied mainly chemistry for a
year at the University of
Heidelberg, and then studied physics at the University of Berlin,
where his principal tutors were Emil Warburg and Paul Drude. He received
his Ph.D. at Berlin in 1906 under Warburg, and after a short period as
an assistant in Frankfurt-am-Main, he returned to Berlin to become
assistant to Heinrich Rubens. In 1911, he obtained the "venia
legendi" for physics to lecture at the University of Berlin, and
remained there until 1918 (with time out for the war in which he was
awarded the Iron Cross, first class) as a member of the physics faculty
having achieved the rank of associate professor.
After World War I, he was appointed member and Head of the Physics
Division in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry at
Berlin-Dahlem, which was at that time under the chairmanship of Fritz
Haber. In 1920, Franck became Professor of Experimental Physics and
Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics at the
University of Göttingen. During the period 1920-1933, when Göttingen
became an important center for quantum physics, Franck was closely
cooperating with Max
Born, who then headed the Institute for Theoretical Physics. It was
in Göttingen that Franck revealed himself as a highly gifted tutor,
gathering around him and inspiring a circle of students and
collaborators (among them: Blackett,
Condon, Kopfermann, Kroebel, Maier-Leibnitz, Oppenheimer, and Rabinovich,
to mention some of them), who in later years were to be renowned in
their own fields.
After the Nazi regime assumed power in Germany, Franck and his family
moved to Baltimore, U.S.A., where he had been invited to lecture as
Speyer Professor at Johns Hopkins
University. He then went to Copenhagen, Denmark, as a guest
professor for a year. In 1935, he returned to the United States as
Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University, leaving there in 1938
to accept a professorship in physical chemistry at the University
of Chicago. During World War II Franck served as Director of the
Chemistry Division of The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of
Chicago, which was the center of the Manhattan District's Project.
In 1947, at the age of 65, Franck was named professor emeritus at the
University of Chicago, but he continued to work at the University as
Head of the Photosynthesis Research Group until 1956.
While in Berlin Professor Franck's main field of investigation was the
kinetics of electrons, atoms, and molecules. His initial researches
dealt with the conduction of electricity through gases (the mobility of
ions in gases). Later, together with Hertz, he investigated the
behaviour of free electrons in various gases-in particular the inelastic
impacts of electrons upon atomswork which ultimately led to the
experimental proof of some of the basic concepts of Bohr's atomic
theory, and for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize, for 1925.
Franck's other investigations, many of which were carried out with
collaborators and students, were also dedicated to problems of atomic
physics - those on the exchange of energy of excited atoms (impacts of
the second type, photochemical researches), and optical problems
connected with elementary processes during chemical reactions.
During his period at Göttingen most of his studies were dedicated to
the fluorescence of gases and vapours. In 1925, he proposed a mechanism
to explain his observations ofthe photochemical dissociation of iodine
molecules. Electronic transitions from a normal to a higher vibrational
state occur so rapidly, he suggested, that the position and momenta of
the nuclei undergo no appreciable change in the process. This proposed
mechanism was later expanded by E. U. Condon to a theory permitting the
prediction of mostfavoured vibrational transitions in a band system, and
the concept has since been known as the Franck-Condon principle.
Mention should be made of Professor Franck's courage in following what
was morally right. He was one ofthe first who openly demonstrated
against the issue of racial laws in Germany, and he resigned from the University
of Göttinge in 1933 as a personal protest against the Nazi regime
under Adolf Hitler. Later, in his second homeland, his moral courage was
again evident when in 1945 (two months before Hiroshima) he joined with
a group of atomic scientists in preparing the so-called "Franck
Report" to the War Department, urging an open demonstration of the
atomic bomb in some uninhabited locality as an alternative to the
military decision to use the weapon without warning in the war against
Japan. This report, although failing to attain its main objective, still
stands as a monument to the rejection by scientists of the use of
science in works of destruction.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Professor Franck received the 1951 Max
Planck Medal of the German Physical Society, and he was honoured, in
1953, by the university town of Göttingen, which named him an honorary
citizen. In 1955, he received the Rumford Medal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on photosynthesis, a
subject with which he had become increasingly preoccupied during his
years in the United States. In 1964, Professor Franck was elected as a
Foreign Member of the Royal Society, London, for his contribution to the
understanding of exchanges of energy in electron collisions, to the
interpretation of molecular spectra, and to problems of photosynthesis.
Franck was first married (1911) to Ingrid Josefson, of Göteborg,
Sweden, and had two daughters, Dagmar and Lisa. Some years after the
death of his first wife, he was married (1946) to Hertha Sponer,
Professor of Physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina
(U.S.A.).
Professor Franck died in Germany on May 21, 1964, while visiting in Göttingen.
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