The Papers of Max Bredig

Max Albert Bredig was born in Heidelberg, Germany on June 20, 1902. He was raised alongside his younger sister Marianne in Karlsruhe, where his father, Georg, served as the Director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. Showing an early aptitude for physical chemistry, Max followed in his father’s footsteps and attended the Technical University in Karlsruhe to begin his own training. Max earned the equivalent of a master’s degree in 1925 from Karlsruhe and received his doctorate in 1926 under the direction of his father’s friend and colleague, Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

With Haber’s recommendation, Bredig obtained employment as a research chemist at the Bavarian Nitrogen Works, where he oversaw the x-ray and optical division. These were halcyon days for Bredig. In addition to his work which he took great pride in, Max enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, sailing, and hiking.

When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Max, like all Germans of Jewish heritage, increasingly became the target of anti-Semitic attacks. His father was soon forced into an early retirement after the Nazi government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which banned Jews from teaching at German Universities.

Gradually, the Nazi regime stripped away more and more rights from German Jews, until finally, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of their German citizenship entirely. At the Bavarian Nitrogen Works, Max’s colleagues began warning him that the firm would soon be Aryanized and that his continued employment at the firm would soon be impossible. Max took the warnings around him seriously and began planning to emigrate out of the country.

Max fled Nazi Germany in 1937, travelling first to Sweden, and then to England, before finally arriving at the University of Michigan where he had accepted a fellowship to work in the Department of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering. Here, he would work alongside one of his father’s best pupils, Kasimir Fajans, who himself had immigrated just a year earlier.

Although now free from the oppressive yoke of the Nazi regime, the thoughts of those Max left behind were always close to the surface. He worked tirelessly to bring his father to the U.S. and to secure the release of his sister and brother-in-law from the Gurs concentration camp. Having successfully reunited with his father, sister, and brother-in-law in New York, Max began a family of his own. He married Lydia Levy in 1944 and together they had one son named George.

In 1946 Max was hired by Eugene Wigner, the Director of Research and Development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Bredig and Wigner were once colleagues in Berlin and Wigner recognized Bredig’s talent for x-ray diffraction as a potentially useful technique at Oak Ridge. Max remained at Oak Ridge in a variety of positions until his death on November 21, 1977.

Today, Max Bredig is remembered as a first-rate scientist. He published approximately 100 papers and is probably best known for his work on the interaction of molten metallic halides with their metals. He was a member of many scientific organizations including, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Chemists’ Club, the American Crystallographic Association, and the Tennessee Academy of Sciences. The mineral bredigite, Ca7Mg (SiO4)4, was even named in his honor, for the work he did studying the mineral’s polymorphism. To this day, the Max Bredig Award is given out by the Electrochemical Society to recognize excellence in molten salt and ionic liquid chemistry research, in recognition of Max’s seminal work.