Johannes Rydberg was one of the grandfathers of modern-day physics and chemistry, but persuading his peers to recognise his theories of atomic structure was not always easy. Mike Sutton delves deeper.
The contest for a vacant university chair can be prolonged and painful. But few are as fraught as that launched in 1897 after the retirement of Karl Holmgren, a professor of physics at Sweden’s Lund University. The obvious successor was his assistant, Johannes Robert Rydberg (’Janne’ to his friends), who had already taught physics there for 15 years. By then, Rydberg had published significant contributions to physics that threw new light on chemical phenomena. Nevertheless, when three independent experts assessed the contenders, only one recommended Rydberg. The others declared him unsuitable, because his principal discoveries arose from the analysis of experimental results obtained by other scientists