Alfred Werner (chemist)

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Alfred Werner

Alfred Werner (born December 12, 1866 in Mulhouse ( Alsace ), † November 15, 1919 in Zurich ) was a Swiss chemist . He is considered one of the founders of complex chemistry .

Life

Werner, a Swiss citizen since 1895, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1913 “because of his work on the bonding of atoms in molecules , which enabled him to clarify older research areas and open up new ones, especially in the field of inorganic chemistry ” .

In 1913 he was the first inorganic chemist to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry and was also the only one in this field until 1973.

He was born in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1866 and was already interested in chemistry as a schoolboy. During his military service in Karlsruhe he attended lectures on chemistry at the technical university there . Not least because of his skeptical attitude towards the new Prussian order, which is typical for many Alsatians, he decided to study chemistry in Switzerland. He enrolled at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum (later ETH ) in Zurich in the winter semester of 1886/87 and graduated in technical chemistry in 1889. He completed his dissertation in the field of organic chemistry (it concerned the stereochemistry of organic nitrogen compounds) with Arthur Hantzsch in 1890 before going on a one-semester research stay at Bethelot at the Collège de France in Paris . After returning to Zurich, he completed his habilitation at the Polytechnic and then held from the summer semester 1892 up to and including the summer semester of the following year as a private lecturer on special chapters of chemistry. In 1893 he went to the University of Zurich , where he became a professor in 1894. He stayed that way until his death.

Werner excelled particularly in researching the coordination connections . The impetus for this came from a lecture on the subject, for which he had to prepare in 1892. In 1893 he published an article on "Contributions to the constitution of inorganic compounds" in the journal for inorganic chemistry . With this, he countered the chain theory of the chemist Sophus Mads Jørgensen with the correct knowledge for the interpretation of the experimental findings, completely new ideas about the bonding relationships of complex compounds and thus prevailed. This is seen as the beginning of complex chemistry. A notable aspect of the work of 1893 was the lack of an adequate empirical basis for the far-reaching theses (he himself had not carried out a single experiment in this area up to that point!). This fact later prompted a German colleague to describe Werner's coordination theory as an “ingenious cheek”. Werner researched complex chemistry mainly using metal amines. His doctoral student Victor L. King succeeded in finding the evidence of chiral (optically active) metal complexes that Werner had long sought (published with Werner in 1911). Since the opinion was widespread at the time that carbon must be present in optically active substances, Werner also looked for an example without carbon and found it in 1914 in hexol.

In 1907 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1910 Werner received an offer from the University of Würzburg to head the institute as the successor to Julius Tafel , which he did not accept.

In 2001 an article was published with Werner and his doctoral student Marie Scavany-Grigorieff as co-authors (based on a preparation by the two of them (a binuclear cobalt complex) from the collection of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Zurich).

Werner had numerous students, especially from abroad, but did not found a school. One reason for this was that one had the impression that he had dealt exhaustively with the area of ​​metal amines in particular.

In 1905 Werner was the first to propose a version of the long form of the periodic table .

He found his final resting place in the Rehalp cemetery in Zurich

Works

literature

  • Lutz Gade: "A genius cheek": Alfred Werner's coordination theory , in: Chemistry in our time , Volume 36, 2002, 168
  • GB Kauffman: Alfred Werner- Founder of Coordination Chemistry , Springer Verlag 1966
  • GB Kauffman (Ed.) Werner Centennial , American Chemical Society 1967

Web links

Commons : Alfred Werner  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lutz Gade : “Eine geniale Chechheit” - Alfred Werner's coordination theory ( Memento from April 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 439 kB), Chemistry in Our Time, 36th year 2002, No. 3.
  2. ^ Alfred Werner: Contribution to the constitution of inorganic compounds. In: Journal of Inorganic Chemistry. 3, 1893, pp. 267-330, doi: 10.1002 / zaac.18930030136 .
  3. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 256.
  4. ↑ Personal news in the journal for Angew. Chemie 23 , 1417 (1910).
  5. ↑ Ekkehard Diemann, Achim Müller Alfred Werner, the father of complex chemistry, published in 2001 in Inorganic Chemistry , Chemistry in Our Time, Volume 36, 2002, 80. The article appeared in Inorganic Chemistry, Volume 40, 2001, 1065-1066. One of the authors is the current director of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, Heinz Berke.
  6. ↑ Jay Labinger, Alfred Werner's role in the mid-20th century flourishing of American Inorganic Chemistry, Chimia, Volume 68, 2014, No. 5, pp. 293f
  7. ↑ Entry on the periodic table. In: Römpp Online . Georg Thieme Verlag, accessed on June 4, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Werner, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss chemist; Nobel Prize Winner
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Mulhouse
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1919
Place of death Zurich