Leif Tronstad - Academic Career

Academic Career

Tronstad spent the first year of a research period as an assistant to Herbert Freundlich in Dahlem, Berlin. He studied the passivity of metal surfaces, and made a breakthrough when he managed to measure extremely thin oxide surface coatings, thus solving a problem dating from the time of Michael Faraday. He continued to Stockholm to study metallography under Carl Benedicks, and to elaborate further on his results from Berlin. The work was completed in 1931 and his thesis, spanning 250 pages, was published in German as Optische Untersuchungen zur Frage der Passivität des Eisens und Stahls. For it, he received the doctorate degree. He was hired at the Norwegian Institute of Technology as a lecturer in the summer of 1931, although he spent the first year at the University of Cambridge, conducting further research with a scholarship from a memorial fund of Christian Michelsen. The research at Cambridge was a continuation of his thesis work, but this time he tested his method on mercury.

Following the death in 1934 of a professor of technical inorganic chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Tronstad was appointed his successor on 17 April 1936, effective from 1 May. At the time, he was one of the youngest professors in Norway. He was a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and in early 1940 he became vice president of the Norwegian Chemical Society. During his short scientific career, Tronstad penned about eighty scientific publications, including fourteen on heavy water-related topics.

The properties of heavy water had been discovered in 1932 by Harold Urey. In 1933, Leif Tronstad and Jomar Brun, the head of Norsk Hydro Rjukan, created a plan for industrial production of heavy water in Norway. As Norsk Hydro were already producing ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer, Tronstad and Brun had realized that large amounts of electrolyzed water were available. Tronstad was paid by Norsk Hydro as a consultant. Already in 1934, Norsk Hydro had opened a plant near the power station at Vemork. This was the world's first plant for industrial mass production of heavy water. Both French and German scientists expressed interest in the project.