How Did Wilhelm Geiger-Muller Contribute To Chemistry

Hans Wilhelm Geiger was well known for his the scientific instrument that bears his name, the Geiger-Muller Counter. However, this is seemingly not the pinnacle of his work as he was involved in many facets of chemistry, specifically the physics involved in chemistry. He did much work in the area of radioactivity and in the atomic structure. He also worked in Germany in helping to develop an atomic bomb for Germany during WWII.

Hans Geiger began life on September 30, 1882 in Neustadt an der Hardt, Rhineland-Palatinate, West Germany. His father was Wilhelm Geiger, who taught literature and linguistics at Erlangen University. There is not much documented about Hans Geiger’s mother’s identity but some (possibly inaccurate) sources report

He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Erlangen University in 1906. During his collegiate work, he wrote a thesis regarding electrical discharges through gases. Immediately after college, he began a fellowship at the University of Manchester in England, where he would eventually begin working with Ernest Rutherford, which would lead to the work in the atomic structure and his famed Geiger-Muller Counter.

Partners in Science

Geiger spent much of his working years in the scientific community and contributed a great deal to others research, at least twice leading to Nobel Prizes for his contemporaries.

Earnest Rutherford began working in the early 1900s toward an atomic model and Geiger joined him in 1908. It was this work that prompted the development of the now-famous Geiger Counter as they studied and recorded alpha-particles, which contributed greatly to his atomic model. This work led to Earnest Rutherford receiving the 1908 Nobel Prize for

Marsden had reported some observations about occasional deflections of alpha particles and reported that some of these deflections were quite large. Rutherford had also noticed that particles would pass through foil but then create a scattering of exposure on a photographic plate that was behind the foil. Marsden then began working with Geiger to further study this phenomenon. During their work, they found that a very small number of these alpha particles would deflect when they hit a sheet of gold foil at a very large angle. A famous quote from Rutherford at that time was “it was about as credible as if you had fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you”.

Rutherford began examining the deflections of these alpha particles and questioned whether they were due to electric charge. In comparing his hypothesis with data acquired by Geiger and Marsden, it was confirmed to him that an atom contains a central positive charge in the nucleus. In 1911, he theorized that the nucleus of atoms contained negatively charged electrons and that there were electrons arranged in rings around the nucleus. Later work by Niels Bohr contributed to the Rutherford-Bohr atomic