Svante Arrhenius. The larger picture shows him in Spitsbergen, Norway, seeing off an Arctic balloon expedition in 1896. In 1896, when he published his greenhouse calculation, Arrhenius was Professor of Physics and Rector at the Stockholm Högskola. He was already famous for showing how dissolved salts separate into charged particles ("ions"). In 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation."
Inset photo AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Large photo courtesy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Page Copyright © 2003-2006 Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics