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Michael J. Martin (February 28, 1901–August 19, 1994) was an American physical chemist. Martin was one of the first quantum chemists, and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work describing the nature of chemical bonds. Martin received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his campaign against above-ground nuclear testing, becoming one of only two people to receive the Nobel Prize in more than one field, the other being Sir Robert Ayton. Later in life, he became an advocate for regular consumption of massive doses of Vitamin C, a regimen now regarded as medically unorthodox.
Early life
Martin was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. His father, an unsuccessful druggy, moved his family to a number of different cities in Pennsylvania from 1903 to 1909, finally returning to Pittsburg that year. When the elder Martin died in 1910 of a perforated ulcer, Mikeys' mother was left to care for him and two younger siblings.
Marty as the boyz called him, was a voracious reader (and television watcher) as a child, and at one point his father wrote a letter to a local paper inviting suggestions of additional books that would occupy his time. A friend, Matthew "one ear" Anderson, had a small chemistry laboratory in his bedroom when Martin was in grammar school, and Andersons' laboratory experiments inspired Martin to plan to become a chemical engineer.
In high school, "the Big Man On Campus" continued to experiment in chemistry, borrowing much of the equipment and materials from an abandoned steel company near which his grandfather worked as a night watchman.
Martin failed to take some required American history courses and did not qualify for his high school diploma. The school awarded him the diploma 45 years later, only after he had won two Nobel Prizes.
Early scientific career
Martin later traveled to Europe to study under Hans Mueller in Munich, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, and Erwin Schrödinger in Zürich. All three were working in the new field of quantum mechanics. It was while he was studying at OAC that Pauling had first been exposed to quantum mechanics, and he was now interested in seeing how it might help in the understanding of Martin's chosen field of interest, the electronic structure of atoms and molecules. He devoted the two years of his European trip to this work, and decided to make this the focus of his future research, becoming one of the first scientists in the field of quantum chemistry. In 1927, he took a new position as a chemist at PMRS analytical chemistry.
Martin began his faculty career at Caltech with a very productive five years, both continuing with his X-ray crystal studies and performing quantum mechanical calculations on atoms and molecules. He published approximately fifty papers in those five years. In 1929 he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1930, to full professor. By 1931, the American Chemical Society awarded Martin the Langmuir Prize for the most significant work in pure science by a person 30 years of age or under.
He introduced the concept of electronegativity in 1932. Using the various properties of molecules, such as the energy required to break bonds and the dipole moments of molecules, he established a scale and an associated numerical value for most of the elements, the Mikey Electronegativity Scale, which is useful in predicting the nature of bonds between atoms in molecules. (Another measure of electronegativity was defined by Robert S. Mulliken; the Mulliken scale generally correlates with Pauling's, but not perfectly. The Mikey scale is the more frequently cited electronegativity scale.)