The Carpenter’s Son Who Won the Nobel Prize

If you ever sat through a chemistry lesson, you have written his name. Van der Waals — the tiny forces between molecules. Born in Leiden in 1837, the eldest of ten children of a carpenter. And under the law of the time, he could not even enrol at the university down the road.

The obstacle was Latin and Greek. University entrance demanded them, and working-class boys did not get them. So Johannes Diderik van der Waals took the road that was open: he finished the advanced primary school at fifteen and became a teacher’s apprentice. By 1861 he held the certificates to teach, and to run a school. In 1862 he started attending lectures in mathematics, physics and astronomy at Leiden University. As a listener. Not a student. The university let outsiders sit in on a few courses a year, and he sat in on every one he could fit around a full-time job.

Then the law moved. Dispensation from the classical languages could now be granted by the minister of education. Van der Waals got his, passed the physics and mathematics exams for doctoral study, and kept teaching school the whole time — first in Deventer, then in The Hague, close enough to Leiden to keep going back for the lectures.

On 14 June 1873 he defended his doctoral thesis at Leiden. Its argument: gas and liquid are not two different substances but two states of the same one, and a single equation can describe both. The thesis was written in Dutch. James Clerk Maxwell reviewed it in the journal Nature — and, by his own account, learned Dutch specially to read it. One of the century’s greatest physicists acquired a language to read a carpenter’s son’s dissertation.

The career that follows is the boring kind of extraordinary. First professor of physics at the new municipal university in Amsterdam, 1877. Retirement at seventy. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1910, at seventy-two, two years after he stopped working — for that equation of state for gases and liquids. The attractive forces between molecules carry his name in every chemistry textbook on Earth. Most students meet him before they ever learn he was a person.

There is a Leiden twist. His second big result, the law of corresponding states, is what guided the experiments of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes — who in 1908 liquefied helium in a Leiden laboratory and briefly made the city the coldest place on the planet. Two Leiden Nobel laureates, two different men, two different stories; the cold was Onnes’ work, the equations behind it were Van der Waals’. The hidden gems guide opens that story from the cold side.

One more fact, because the record keeps it: his wife Anna died in 1881, at thirty-four. He published next to nothing for more than a decade. He never remarried. The equations waited.

The walk stops where he was born — stop 29 — a narrow street you would cross without a second look. The book gives him the full story. The chemistry textbooks give him forever.