Johann Jacob Diesbach

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Johann Jacob Diesbach was a paint manufacturer and the discoverer of Berlin blue (Prussian blue), the first synthetic color pigment. He lived in Berlin around 1700.

Little is known about him, even his first names are only mentioned in one source (JE Berger) (mostly he is only cited as Diesbach). He was Swiss and there is evidence that he lived in Berlin between 1701 and 1716. According to Georg Ernst Stahl , Diesbach worked in the laboratory of the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel at the time of the discovery - he fled from Berlin to the Netherlands in 1707 to avoid arrest (and also produced Prussian blue there at times). The discovery happened around 1706, it is first mentioned in a letter from Johann Leonhard Frisch (1666–1743) to the President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . Frisch had not discovered the pigment, but u. a. further developed through acid treatment and brought to market maturity. He also published about it in 1710 (Notitia coerulei Berolinensis nuper inventi). Diesbach worked for Frisch from around 1701. They produced Prussian blue in Berlin until at least 1716.

Prussian blue was discovered by accident. Diesbach produced the red Florentine lacquer in the usual way by precipitating cochineal solution with alum , iron (II) sulfate and potash . When he ran out of potash, he took contaminated potash, which Dippel had previously used to clean animal oil. Instead of red, it was given a deep blue color. While it was earlier believed that the color was used until the 1720s by painters, the color, for example, was found in recent analyzes in paintings by Antoine Watteau , which date back to 1710 ( Embarkation for Cythera at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, wedding on the land in Sanssouci). It was used for dyeing textiles as early as 1749 by Pierre Joseph Macquer . Color samples were sent to artists and academies all over Europe as early as 1709 (by Frisch and by the director of the Berlin Academy of the Arts Joseph Werner ).

The inventors managed to keep the manufacturing process secret for a long time (despite the large sums of money they were offered, for example, from Italy) until it was published by John Woodward in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1724 . He had received it in 1723 in a letter from the Berlin pharmacist and chemist Caspar Neumann , who himself reconstructed a manufacturing process from his knowledge of the basic substances.

literature

  • Winfried Pötsch u. a .: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch, 1989
  • Alexander Kraft: On the discovery and history of Prussian Blue , Bull. Hist. Chem., Volume 33, 2008, pp. 61-67

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berger, Kerrn all Fridrichs-Städt's events, Manuscript, Berlin, 1730, Staatsbibl. Prussia. Kulturbesitz, Ms. Boruss. quart. 124
  2. ↑ Alexander Kraft On two letters from Caspar Neumann to John Woodward revealing the secret method for preparation of prussian blue , In: Bull. Hist. Chem., Volume 34, 2009, Issue 2, pp. 134-140, pdf
  3. ↑ Experimenta et observationes chemicae . Berlin 1731.
  4. ^ Frisch: Correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, editor LH Fischer, Berlin 1896, Reprint Hildesheim: Olms 1976
  5. ↑ In: Miscellanea Berolinensia ad incrementum scientiarum, ex scriptis Societati Regiae Scientiarium exhibitis 1, 1710, 377-378
personal data
SURNAME Diesbach, Johann Jacob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss paint manufacturer and chemist
DATE OF BIRTH 17th century
DATE OF DEATH 18th century