Rosalind Franklin
Paris

With World War II ending in 1945, Franklin asked Adrienne Weill for help and to let her know of job openings for "a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal." At a conference in the autumn of 1946, Weill introduced Franklin to Marcel Mathieu, a director of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the network of institutes that comprises the major part of the scientific research laboratories supported by the French government. This led to her appointment with Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'État in Paris. Franklin joined the labo (as referred to by the staff) of Mering on 14 February 1947 as one of the fifteen chercheurs (researchers).

Mering was an X-ray crystallographer who applied X-ray diffraction to the study of rayon and other amorphous substances, in contrast to the thousands of regular crystals that had been studied by this method for many years. He taught her the practical aspects of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances. This presented new challenges in the conduct of experiments and the interpretation of results. Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal and to other carbonaceous materials, in particular the changes to the arrangement of atoms when these are converted to graphite. She published several further papers on this work which has become part of the mainstream of the physics and chemistry of coal and carbon. Franklin coined the terms graphitising and non-graphitising carbon. The coal work was covered in a 1993 monograph, and in the regularly-published textbook Chemistry and Physics of Carbon. Mering continued the study of carbon in various forms, using X-ray diffraction and other methods.
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