Miguel A. Catalán Sañudo
(Zaragoza, 1894 - Madrid, 1957)

Miguel A. Catalán Sañudo studied high school at the Instituto General y Técnico of Saragossa and graduated in 1909. He attended the University of Saragossa, where he studied sciencies and specialized in chemistry. After graduating in 1913, he began working in the educational and the industrial sectors. On 27 October 1913, he was appointed interim assistant to the Science department of the High School in Saragossa, a position he held until 24 October 1915, although he spent some of that time on leave in Madrid.  The next day, October 25, he took the position of assistant in the Science department of the Instituto General y Técnico of Saragossa, a post he won in a public competition. His association with secondary education lasted for a significant part of his life as a high school teacher and also as the author of textbooks of physics and chemistry.

From October 1, 1913 until September 30, 1915, he combined his teaching activities with his work as chemist in the Sociedad Aragonesa de Portland Artificial, a company that made cement. But neither teaching nor the industry fulfilled his professional ambitions. He wanted to further his studies of sciences and moved to Madrid to do his Ph.D. He lived in a boarding house on Arenal St., and was known as "the wise" or "the climber", for he was, and would remain for the rest of his life, a great lover of nature, making frequent trips to the mountains near Madrid.

In January 1915, he started working in the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Físicas of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAE) in the Spectroscopy laboratory headed by Ángel del Campo y Cerdán, professor of Chemical Analysis, at the Faculty of Sciences in Madrid. Campo y Cerdán was also the supervisor of his dissertation (Espectroquímica del magnesio. Nuevas líneas en su espectro y en el de la plata, 1917).

Catalán had considered the possibility of studying abroad while he was working on his Ph.D. Given his links with the JAE, he was well aware of the institution’s grant program. He did apply and obtained a grant, but he was unable to use it until 1920, first due to his military service, and then because he obtained a position to teach physics and chemistry at the Instituto General y Técnico in Palencia, a job he exchanged for one in the High School in Avila. The JAE, however, wanted him to remain in Madrid and even before he obtained that position, Catalán began teaching at the Instituto-Escuela, where he continued until he obtained a university chair in 1934.

He finally got his JAE grant and arrived in London in September 1920. He worked at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine with Alfred Fowler and achieved his greatest success: the discovery of the multiplets, which he presented in an article entitled "Series and Other Regularities in the Spectrum of Manganeso," published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1922).

He returned to Madrid in the autumn of 1921 and continued his research, which got increasing attention from foreign colleagues. Especially significant was his collaboration with Arnold Sommerfeld and his group in Munich. He got a grant from the International Educational Board of the Rockefeller Foundation to work in Munich during 1924-1925, accompanied by his wife, Jimena Menéndez Pidal (1901-1990), daughter of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, whom he married on his return from London.

In 1934, when he was working in the newly created Instituto Nacional de Física y Química, he obtained the post of chair of Atomic Structure and Spectroscopy at the Faculty of Sciences in the University of Madrid. These bright horizons, however, were overshadowed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was with his wife, Jimena and their son Diego (who eventually became an eminent philologist) in the country house of her father, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in San Rafael (Segovia.) After a day of strikes by the planes from Cuatro Vientos, the Catalán family fled to El Espinar, and then to Segovia, controlled by the forces led by General Franco. He spent the war in that city, teaching high school and working in an information center of the wounded in the war. He went back to Madrid at the end of the war to find out he could not return to his old laboratory and was not allowed to teach in public institutions. He earned his living working for Mataderos (slaughterhouse) de Mérida, Zeltia chemical factory, Industria Riojana, and Laboratorios Ibys. He also collaborated on a project initiated by his wife: the establishment of a private school to recapture the spirit of the Instituto-Escuela: the Colegio Estudio where he taught physics, chemistry, and mathematics between 1940 and 1946.

In early 1946, he regained his university chair but this did not open
the gates to research, now being conducted at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (the university had no resources). However, his prestige and the many job offers he received from the United States would eventually faciliate his entry into the Consejo, 
although not in the Rockefeller Institute (now renamed Instituto de Química-Física Rocasolano), but in the Instituto de Óptica Daza de Valdés, led by José María Otero Navascués, who appointed Catalán head of the Spectrum Department in 1950.

On 30 March 1955, he was elected member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales in Madrid, another sign showing that he was being accepted by "official" Spain. He never delivered his acceptance speech because of his death in 1957.

Miguel Catalán’s activity in the 1950s was very intense. In 1952, he was elected director of the Joint Commission for Spectroscopy of the International Union of Scientific Unions. In 1970, the International Astronomical Union gave the name "Miguel A. Catalán " to one of the craters on the dark side of the Moon, at 46 degrees south latitude and 87 degrees west longitude, in recognition of the importance of his discovery of the multiplets in the development of astrophysics.