The Politics of Chemistry

Untold Stories of Women in Electrochemistry: Vicenta Arnal, a Spanish Scientist in the 1930s

“…Physicist Blas Cabrera was the director of the INFQ 15 and led the electricity and magnetism department, which mainly focused on studying diamagnetism; Miguel Catalán was the director of the spectroscopy department, which garnered the INFQ great international prestige for his discovery of multiplets 16 ; physicist Julio Palacios led the X-ray department and worked on crystal structures in conjunction with Paul Scherrer at ETH Zurich; Antonio Madinaveitia was the director of the organic chemistry department; and physical chemistry was led by Enrique Moles, who enjoyed broad international recognition for his research on the experimental determination of atomic weights. 17 The director of the electrochemistry department was Julio Guzmán, who had been trained in Leipzig at Wilhelm Ostwald's prestigious Physical Chemistry Institute and had worked in the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Físicas (LIF), a forerunner of the INFQ, in the 1910s. 18 He led several projects on the electroanalysis of copper, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, etc.…”