Richard Abegg

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Richard Abegg
obituary

Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg (born January 9, 1869 in Danzig ; † April 3, 1910 in Tessin (Pomerania), today Cieszyn near Koszalin ) was a German chemist and pioneer of valence theory . He found that the highest positive and highest negative "electrovalence" of an element add up to the number 8. This rule is also called Abegg's rule .

Life

Richard Abegg was the son of the secret Admiralty Councilor Wilhelm Abegg (1834–1913) and his wife Margarethe Friedenthal. His brothers were the Prussian politician Wilhelm Abegg and the administrative lawyer Waldemar Abegg . In 1895 he married Lina Simon. Richard Abegg died in a hot air balloon accident .

He was of strong stature and an enthusiastic athlete (sailor, ice skating, skiing, horse riding, ballooning). Abegg was a reserve officer in a hussar regiment. He made his first balloon flight in 1900 in the army.

Academic achievement

As a schoolboy Abegg had a small chemistry laboratory and was stimulated to occupy himself with physical chemistry by Lothar Meyer's Modern Theory of Chemistry . After attending school at Wilhelmgymnasium in Berlin and graduating from high school in 1886, Abegg matriculated at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel for the subject of physical chemistry . There he studied with Albert Ladenburg . He later moved to Tübingen , where he became a member of the Igel Academic Association and was a student of Lothar Meyer, and then to Berlin . There he received his doctorate on July 19, 1891 under Professor August Wilhelm von Hofmann with the thesis on Chrysene and its derivatives to become Dr. phil. He then worked as an assistant to Wilhelm Ostwald (Leipzig), was with Svante Arrhenius (Stockholm) in 1892/93 and from 1894 with Walther Nernst (Göttingen), where he soon qualified as a professor and three years later received the title of professor.

In 1899 Abegg became head of department at the Chemical Institute in the University of Breslau at the laboratory formerly headed by Albert Ladenburg. In 1900 he turned down a call to the University of Oslo to succeed Peter Waage , but became a member of the local scientific academy. In 1907 Abegg was "designated as the regular professor and director of the physical-chemical institute of the Technical University in Breslau". In 1909 he became a full professor at the newly founded Technical University of Breslau , opened in 1910. He did not see the inauguration of the Physico-Chemical Institute, of which he was designated director, because of his premature death in a balloon accident.

After starting out in organic chemistry, he later dealt exclusively with inorganic and physical chemistry. He was an advocate of the theories of Ostwald, Arrhenius, and Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in physical chemistry.

Together with his colleague Guido Bodländer , he published Die Elektroaffinität, a new principle of chemical systematics , in 1895 . In it he introduced a new quantity for the order of the compounds in inorganic chemistry (including complexes), the electroaffinity. Later, in the textbooks of the time, it was often treated as synonymous with electronegativity (or later confused with electron affinity ), a property of atoms, but it corresponds to what is now referred to as the oxidation potential in aqueous solutions (ability of an element to form ions in aqueous solution).

Of importance for the history of the periodic table is his essay from 1904 Valence and the Periodic System in which he gave an electrochemical interpretation of the rule of octaves by Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev . According to Scerri, this is one of the first references to ascribe electrons a role in chemical bonding and an important intermediate step between Mendeleev's rule of octaves and the octet theory of valence by Gilbert Newton Lewis (from 1916) and Irving Langmuir . In his paper from 1904 Abegg set up the valence rule according to which the highest positive and highest negative electrovalence of an element together result in the number 8. It is also called Abegg's rule .

From 1901 Abegg was also co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie , the members' newspaper of the German Electrochemical Society .

Abegg laid the basis for the Handbuch der Inorganischen Chemie (1905–1939).

In 1900 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina Scholars' Academy .

Airship travel

Abegg also dealt with photography and airship travel. He was the founder and chairman of the Silesian Aviation Association in Wroclaw. He also held the position of assessor in the presidium of the German Airship Association. Abegg died in an accident with the balloon: When landing due to sudden downdrafts after a trip with the Silesia balloon , the three passengers, including his wife Lina (also balloon operator), were largely unhurt from the basket, the balloon with Abegg tore itself free and then fell from a great height. Abegg died on the same day from his serious fall injuries (broken skull). The incident remained a mystery to Nernst, but he suspected that the technical defects that occurred during the previous impact ultimately caused the crash and not pilot errors of the Ladenburg, which was considered calm and level-headed ( with a sure presence of mind ).

Fonts

  • About chrysene and its derivatives. Schade, Berlin 1891
  • Instructions for calculating volumetric analyzes. Grass, Barth & Co, Breslau 1900
  • The theory of electrolytic dissociation. Enke, Stuttgart 1903

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Theodor Des Coudres: Richard Abegg. In: Physikalische Zeitschrift. 11, 1910, pp. 425-429 (here p. 429).
  2. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Richard Abegg at academictree.org, accessed on January 1, 2018.
  3. ^ Obituary by Nernst, Reports Deutsche Chem. Ges. 1913, p. 619
  4. ^ GH Emmerich : Richard Abegg . In: Lexicon for photography and reproduction technology . 1910, p. 1 .
  5. ^ Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, Volume 20, May 1895, pp. 453-499
  6. ^ William B. Jensen, Electronegativity from Avogadro to Pauling, Part 2, Journal of Chemical Education, Volume 80, 2003, p. 284
  7. ^ Abegg, Valence and the Periodic System. Attempting a theory of the molecular compound, Zeitschrift für inorganic Chemie, Volume 39, 1904, pp. 330-380
  8. ↑ Scerri, Tale of seven scientists, Oxford UP 2016, p. 76
  9. ↑ List of members Leopoldina, Richard Abegg (with picture)
  10. ^ Obituary, reports Deutsche Chem. Ges. 1913, p. 621
personal data
SURNAME Abegg, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Abegg, Richard Wilhelm Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig , Province of Prussia , Kingdom of Prussia
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1910
Place of death Ticino (Pomerania) , Kingdom of Prussia , German Empire