Karel Schinzel | Pioneer in Color Photography | (1886-1951)

Dr. Karel Schinzel was a pioneer in color photography. He was born 20 December 1886 at Edrovice, now part of the town of Rýmařov in northern Moravia, as the first son of Karel and Therezie Schinzel. In 1896 the family moved to Opava. He finished the business school in 1902, just at the time he began to discover the world of photography. What interested him more than photography as an art was the chemical process of developing the pictures. Karel soon found himself a job as an accountant with the chemical and drug manufacturer Hell & Co., Apotheke in Troppau. By this time Karel had begun to experiment with color photography. At the age of 17 he was studying journals on chemistry and photography in English, French and German. On 8 April 1905 he applied in Vienna for a patent on a procedure for developing three-layer color photographs that he called “Katachromie”. Part of his discovery would be used later by Godowsky and Mannes to produce the film known as Kodachrome (1935), and by Willmans in developing the Agfacolor system (1935-36). His employers helped the young scientist by sending him to their Vienna branch, where Karel attended lectures on chemistry at the University of Technology. At the same time he attended evening courses at the Realschule in Schattenfeld. In 1912 he gained the title of engineer.

He was called to serve in the military, with which he spent three years, continuing at the same time to work as a chemist and photographer. After the war he worked for a year as a research chemist for Wetzler & Co. He worked on a doctoral dissertation which, surprisingly enough, concerned the manufacture of explosives, a topic quite different from that of color photography. He received his doctorate in the technical sciences in 1919 at the age of 32 at the University of Technology in Vienna. In 1922 he submitted to a committee of experts a revolutionary proposal for improving his earlier patent. The committee turned it down as utterly utopian. Only a few years later Kodak came out with a new film called Kodachrome based on Schinzel’s research.

Schinzel returned to Opava, where he set up a new laboratory at his parents’ house. With a determination all his own Schinzel continued in his endless series of chemical experiments, but received no recognition, either academic or financial, for his efforts. Schinzel the obscure scientist became ever more withdrawn, refusing to communicate with the outside world. In 1935-1936 he finally began to publish the results of his work in professional journals and wrote a history of his research. A series of articles in the magazine Das Lichtbild caught the attention of the Kodak company officials in America and at Agfa in Germany. Eastman Kodak came to realize the significance of Schinzel’s research, and in December 1936 he was invited to Kodak’s main factory in Rochester, New York, and later to London. After much preliminary negotiation and assurances, the American corporation bought Schinzel’s inventions and the rights to 27 patents for a minimal sum.

In March 1938 a tired Schinzel returned to Vienna, where he rested by immersing himself in specialized literature. His difficult financial situation forced him to do research work for smaller firms. He continued his research there until 1945, working in his own laboratories and a new flat in Baden. At the age of 58 he married the much younger Hermina Marie Würst, but the large age difference and his absolute obsession with his scientific projects drove them apart, and she left him after two and a half years. And at the end of the war came another blow: the liberating army looted and sacked his laboratory in Baden. He lost his scientific library – books, journals, research records, copies of his patents and his personal papers. His laboratory equipment was completely destroyed. From a few fragments salvaged from his notes he put together a work on color photography for publication in book form. In early November he suddenly lost his sight and on 23 November 1951 he died of a stroke at the age of 65.

During his lifetime Karel Schinzel took out 250 patents in America, England, Germany and Austria on color photography, sound film and reproduction techniques.

Otto Wichterle | Inventor of Contact Lenses | (1913-1998)

Otto Wichterle was born on the 27th of October 1913 in the Moravian town of Prostějov to the family of a co-owner of a successful farm-machinery plant. However, young Otto chose science for his career. After graduation he stayed on at the university and in 1939 he submitted his second doctorate thesis on chemistry, but the wartime Protectorate regime blocked any further activity at the university. Otto Wichterle was able to continue in his scientific work, however, by joining the research institute at the Baťa works in Zlín, where he also taught those who could not study after the German occupants closed all Czech institutes of higher education.

After the war, Otto Wichterle was appointed professor of macro-molecular chemistry at the Czech Technical University. In 1952 he was made a corresponding member of the newly constituted Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and earlier that year he had been made dean at one of the faculties of the newly established University of Chemical Technology. Universities were under a great deal of scrutiny at that time, however, and during one political purge in 1958, Otto Wichterle was expelled from the university.

The Academy and the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, which was established largely thanks to his efforts, became the centre for Otto Wichterle’s work. There he continued in his research into the use of hydrogels, which later gave birth to the first gel contact lenses in 1961. Professor Otto Wichterle, used the metal construction set Merkur for children to construct his “cockostroj” or “lens machine” to make the first pair of contact lenses. It was on Christmas Eve and he had nothing else about the house but Merkur. Using a small dynamo and a small motor he built this primitive machine and produced the lenses.

Because of his open activities during 1968 and particularly after the August Soviet-led occupation, the “normalisation” regime punished Otto Wichterle by removing him from his executive positions and by gradually making his research work more difficult.

After the fall of communism, Otto Wichterle was appointed President of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences at the age of 76. He died in August, 1998.

Jaroslav Heyrovský | Inventor of Polarography | (1890-1967)

Jaroslav Heyrovský was a Czech chemist and inventor. Heyrovský was the inventor of the polarographic method, father of electroanalytical chemistry, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1959.

Jaroslav Heyrovský was born in Prague on 20th December, 1890. He obtained his early education at secondary school till 1909 when he began his study of chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. From 1910 to 1914 he continued his studies at University College, London, under Professors Sir William Ramsay, W.C.Mc.C. Lewis and F.G. Donnan, taking his B.Sc. degree in 1913. He was particularly interested in working with Professor Donnan, on electrochemistry.

Heyrovský’s invention of the polarographic method dates from 1922 and he concentrated his whole further scientific activity on the development of this new branch of electrochemistry. Polarography is an instrumental method of chemical analysis used for qualitative and quantitative determinations of reducible or oxidizable substances. Heyrovský’s instrument measures the current that flows when a predetermined potential is applied to two electrodes immersed in the solution to be analyzed. Within 10 years of the demonstration of the first polarograph (1924) the method was in common use. Heyrovský’s monograph Polarographie appeared in 1941.

In 1950 the Professor was appointed Director of the newly established Polarographic Institute which has been incorporated into the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences since 1952.

Jaroslav Heyrovský died on March 27, 1967. He was interred in the Vysehrad cemetery in Prague.

Jan Jansky | Classified Blood Types | (1873-1921)

Jan Janský was born on April 3, 1873 in Prague. He was a Czech serologist, neurologist and psychiatrist. He is credited with the first classification of blood into the four types (A, B, AB, O) of the ABO blood group system.

Janský studied medicine at Charles University in Prague. From 1899 he worked in a psychiatric clinic in Prague. In 1914 he was named professor. During World War I Janský served two years as a doctor at the front until a heart attack disabled him. After the war he worked as a neuropsychiatrist in a military Hospital.

Through his psychiatric research, Janský tried to find a correlation between mental diseases and blood diseases. He found no such correlation existed and published a study, Hematologicka studie u psychotiku (1907, Hematological study of psychotics), in which he classified blood into four groups I, II, III, IV. At the time this discovery passed almost unnoticed. In 1921 an American medical commission acknowledged Janský’s classification (over that of Karl Landsteiner, who classified blood into only three groups; and was for this (blood types) discovery awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930). Janský’s classification remains in use today.

Janský was also a proponent of voluntary blood donations. He died on September 8, 1921.

The Czech Republic has many claims to fame but one of its greatest and most curious regarding the arts is the country’s unique history of Cubist architecture. Czech architects were the first and only ones in the world to ever design original Cubist buildings.

The Cubism in art was born in Paris thanks to Pablo Picasso and was accepted by many Czech sculptors and painters who traveled between Prague and Paris in that period. From 1910 Prague was a very important center for Cubism and Pavel Janák, a Prague-based architect who had trained in Vienna in that period, was inspired by Cubism. He had been involved in a struggle with then leading architect Jan Kotěra, a proponent of ‘rational’ architecture. By contrast, Janák thought that architecture should be something that was very creative.

Until then Janák had been a member of the Manes Association of Fine Artists but he left to co-found the more avant garde Group of Artists and soon began a new publication. In 1911, he wrote “The Prism and the Pyramid”, an influential essay outlining Cubist precepts in architecture. In 1911, he sketched crystals from the National Museum’s collection of mineralogy and tried to create something like a ‘crystalline’ architecture with many motifs of prisms and pyramids, very dynamic architecture, closer to Expressionism than the rational architecture of Kotěra’s circle.

This style, Cubism in architecture, was accepted by only some people like architects Gočár, Chochola, Králíček and others. And the period was very short because many people were against this new style. Some theoreticians said that it was a ‘betrayal’ of modern architecture. Of course the buildings were expensive as well as ‘bizarre’ which is also why much of the public was against it.

Cubist villas were both costly and demanding, given that most of them were made of brick, which is difficult to cut into geometric shapes. Concrete was far more ideal as a material for Cubist construction, since it could be poured into more dramatic geometric forms.

The most famous examples are Otakar Novotný and Emil Králíček’s Kovařovic House along Prague’s Vyšehrad Embankment,well-known Diamond House with its diamond-shaped motifs along its façade and main portal, a famous streetlamp designed by Emil Králíček, which stands on Jungmann Square.

The ‘dollar’ is known throughout the world, but the word’s origin story begins hundreds of years ago in a small town in Bohemia.

It all begins, in a small mountain town in north-western Bohemia, currently named Jáchymov. The word ‘Dollar’ is derived from the German word ‘Thaler’. The ‘Thaler’ was a silver coin minted in Bohemia and in use throughout Central Europe in the 16th Century. The word Thaler itself is a shortened form of the word ‘Joachimsthaler’, a coin from the city of Joachimsthal in Bohemia, which in German literally means ‘Joachim’s valley’ or ‘Joachim’s dale’, which is where the silver for the coin was mined from.

Considering the success of the ‘Joachimsthaler’, similar coins started to be minted from other rich seams of silver elsewhere in various valleys of this region. Soon, there were many of such coins in circulation which collectively came to be known as Thalers. With increasing demand and circulation of such coins, it found its way in other languages too. Initially into Dutch, where it was known as ‘Daalder’ or ’Daler’, then into English where it was pronounced as ‘Dollar’.