George Bogdan Kistiakowsky, 18 November 1900 - 7 December 1982

Abstract

The name Kistiakowsky was first drawn to my attention 50 years ago by my Oxford tutor H. W. (later Sir Harold) Thompson (F. R. S.), who required me to write an essay on photochemical reactions and suggested that Kistiakowsky’s book (5) should be read as a useful guide to the understanding of those chemical reactions which follow the primary act of light absorption. I followed the advice, which proved to be good, but I did not find the book particularly stimulating. In retrospect, I suppose this was inevitable because, in 1927, when the book was completed, photochemistry was still in a rather dull, classical, ‘stamp-collecting’, phase from which it was shortly rescued by spectroscopic and fluorescence measurements and by techniques for determining absolute reaction rates. Kistiakow sky was destined to contribute in a seminal way to this later development and I had a foretaste of this as I complied with Thompson’s request that I should also read two papers by Dieke & Kistiakowsky (31, 41) on the spectrum of formaldehyde.