Who is von liebig

From H. But they gradually recognized that the substitutions that chemists effected within radicals—of electropositive hydrogen by electronegative chlorine, for example—seriously threatened dualism as a comprehensive explanation of bonding in organic chemistry. In the long run their identification of radicals can be seen as an early step along the path to structural chemistry.

Among other contributions he prepared calcium carbide and discovered various silicon compounds, demonstrating close analogies to the chemistry of carbon. The information contained in this biography was last updated on December 11, Berzelius is best remembered for his experiments that established the law of constant proportions.

With the accidental discovery in of the first commercialized synthetic dye, mauve, Perkin introduced a new era in the chemical industry. In the American Institute of Chemical Engineers celebrated its centennial. Its founding furthered the profession of chemical engineering and represented the beginning of American technological dominance in the 20th century. What happened before humans could produce fertilizer from the air itself, courtesy of the Haber-Bosch process?

Now ubiquitous and vital to modern life, aluminum was once more expensive than gold, locked away in its ore without a commercially viable method to release it. They were often banned. At a particularly emotional outdoor meeting Liebig got carried away with his own oratory and insulted the police who were trying to break up the demonstration.

He got so far out of control he knocked the helmet off one of the officers, and was put in jail for three days. While there he decided to take his career to Paris. In November he found himself working with Gay-Lussac, was admitted to a private research laboratory, and continued his work on fulminates.

The results of all his efforts were presented to the French Academy on March 22nd, and it must have had quite an effect as two days later he was made an "extraordinary" which means assistant professor at the University of Giessen in Germany. Liebig had arrived. Not that the others in his department particularly liked him, but when the only other chemist died, Liebig was able to begin his life's work - teaching others.

He pioneered the concept that the study of chemistry had to be done using an experimental approach. Every student and they came from all over the world, Great Britain, the United States and all of Europe sent their best and brightest , worked in bleak conditions, but received the highest degree of training that was possible.

Everyone learnt how to carry out quantitative and qualitative analysis, and were even given grounding in the new science of "synthesis", i. They also did their own, supervised miniature research projects, a rarity in any teaching laboratory. It is generally reckoned that Liebig's greatest contribution to the future or chemistry and science was in the classroom. He wrote books, scientific papers over still have his name on them , worked to improve food production and was not always right, but he would never be forgotten by all the chemists he trained, some of whom later became very famous in their own right.

One of his more fundamental contributions to the science of chemistry came in when he entered into a friendly dispute with another great chemist - Friedrich Wohler, at the University of Gottingen. Both laboratories were apparently working on, and with, the same substance, but they were getting very different results.

Who was wrong? Neither, as it turned out. Despite the fact that Liebig's silver fulminic acid appeared to have exactly the same composition as Wohler's silver cyanate, they did not behave in the same way - at all!

After some dispute it became clear that just because these two substances contained exactly the same number and types of atoms, this did not mean that they were the same chemically. They began to suspect that a chemical compound was more than a simple collection of atoms, the way those atoms were arranged was of equal or greater importance.

It was the start of "structural chemistry", which the two scientists extended later, in , when they both discovered that certain groups of atoms formed stable, local arrangements between themselves, and that these stable groups could be moved around from one substance to another.

At the time these stable groups were called radicals , and the first of them to be found was the benzoyl radical. This was found during a study of the oil in almonds now called benzaldehyde , and they also found that this benzoyl group of atoms could be altered by changing the nature of other atoms and elements joined to it. It was the start of a brand new way of thinking about chemical bonding in organic chemistry. Click here to.