Name Lucius Bigelow | ||
Lucius Aurelius Bigelow (1892–1973) was an American chemist.
Bigelow was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 31, 1892 to Lucius Aurelius and Mary Elizabeth Bigelow. He graduated from Boston English High and from there went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received his S.B. in 1915. He attended Harvard from 1916 to 1917 and then went to Yale as a Howard Fellow from 1918 to 1919, leaving with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He began his teaching career at St. Lawrence University but only stayed a short time until moving to Brown University, where he taught for nine years. In 1929 Bigelow came to Duke University where he served as a member of the chemistry department faculty until 1961.
Bigelow's primary field of research was fluorine chemistry and the direct fluorination of organic compounds. His research provided the foundations for the preparation of fluorocarbons by direct fluorination carried out during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.
After retiring from active teaching at Duke, Bigelow continued his research work at Hynes Chemical Research, a firm started by several of his former graduate students. In 1958 he was the recipient of the Herty Medal by the Georgia Section of the American Chemical Society, recognizing him as an outstanding Southern chemist.
Lucius A. Bigelow died in 1973, survived by his wife Mary Cummings Bigelow and two children.