Ambrosius Gottfried Hanckwitz

Ambrose Godfrey Hanckwitz

Ambrosius Gottfried Hanckwitz , in England Ambrose Godfrey Hanckwitz , (* 1660 probably in Koethen , † 1741 in London ) was a German-British naturalist.

He was an apprentice pharmacist in Koethen before he went to England at a young age and became Robert Boyle's assistant . He learned through Boyle from Hennig Brand's method (Boyle known at the latest in 1777 through a demonstration by Johann Daniel Kraft in front of the Royal Society) to produce phosphorus from urine and produced it in his own laboratory in London using this method. He offered the phosphorus produced in this way as early as 1685 and had something of a monopoly on it in England, but also delivered to Germany and the rest of Europe, from around 1730 also in larger quantities. The procedure was published in Germany in 1735 after the doctor Johann Heinrich Hampe elicited it from the old Hanckwitz and informed Johann Friedrich Henckel by letter.

In 1733 he described phosphoric acid and invented a device to extinguish fires with explosions.

August Sigmund Frobenius found ether in his laboratory .

literature

• Winfried Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Max Speter: On the history of urine phosphorus: The discovered phosphorus recipe by Boyle-Hanckwitz, Chemiker-Zeitung, Volume 53, 1929, pp. 1005-1006.