Bertram Boltwood

Boltwood attended Yale University, became a professor there and in 1910 was appointed chair of the first academic department of radiochemistry.

In his later days, Boltwood suffered from depression and committed suicide on August 15, 1927. After relocating from England in the 17th century, the Boltwood family was active in the Amherst community for generations. Lucius was the son of a farmer who worked his way through Williams College to become a lawyer. He was a founder of Amherst College and ran for Governor of Massachusetts as an early member of the Liberty Party in 1841. Thomas Kast Boltwood, son of Lucius, was a lawyer who died in 1872 when his son Bertram was 2 years old. Bertram Boltwood was emotionally close with his mother, Margaret Mathilda, and he grew up in her hometown of Castleton, NY. She prepared him to attend Yale, his father's alma mater, by placing him in private school at a young age, followed by the Albany Academy. He was often reminded of a familial tie to Ralph Waldo Emerson through his paternal great-grandmother’s sister (Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins), and it was expected that Boltwood would study and succeed in line with the family legacy. and be appointed chair of radiochemistry in 1910, a position that was the first of its kind. He developed a friendship with Ernest Rutherford, whose highly influential thinking played a role in much of Boltwood's work. They communicated primarily through overseas correspondence, except for a short period from 1909 to 1910 when Rutherford invited Boltwood to join him at the University of Manchester in England.

Radiometric dating and the age of Earth Boltwood is credited as being the first to introduce a uranium-lead dating technique to determine the age of geological samples. and presented calculations based on the presence of helium as a product. He dated a sample of fergusonite at 40 million years, with the caveat that helium could escape and would therefore only provide a minimum age. and he named it "ionium" after the ionizing action of its alpha particles. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913. In 1918, Boltwood became the director of Yale College chemical laboratory. As he took on more responsibilities at the college, he began overseeing the setup of two laboratories – Sloane Physics and Sterling Chemistry. During this time of added stress, he experienced bouts of depression and was forced to take time off to recover from a mental breakdown in 1924. He returned with renewed zeal and continued his work, but fell into periods of depression over the following years. On August 15, 1927, he took his own life in Hancock Point, Maine at the age of 57.