Carl Engler

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Carl Engler
Engler viscometer

Carl Oswald Viktor Engler (born January 5, 1842 in Weisweil ; † February 7, 1925 in Karlsruhe ) was a German chemist, university professor and politician.

life and work

The son of a pastor studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic from 1859 , where he got a position as a scientific assistant in 1863. 1864 Engler at Karl Weltzien at the University of Freiburg Dr. phil received his doctorate and taught there from 1867 to 1872 after his habilitation as a private lecturer. In 1872 Engler became an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Halle (Saale), where he published his two-volume “Handbuch der Technische Chemie” in 1872 and 1874.

In 1876 he succeeded Lothar Meyer as full professor for chemical technology and director of the chemical-technical laboratory of the Karlsruhe Polytechnic. In 1880 he founded the chemical-technical experimental and testing institute there, which he managed until 1887. In 1883/84 he was director of the Polytechnic and in 1884 he turned to petroleum chemistry. 1887 ?? he became a full professor of chemistry and director of the Chemical Institute of the [[TH Karlsruhe]]. ??

In 1919 he retired. His successor as chemistry professor in Karlsruhe was from 1919 Paul Pfeiffer .

In 1870 he published together with Adolph Emmerling , a student of Adolf von Baeyer, a work in which the two first reported on the formation of traces of indigo from a material that is not derived from indigo. They have not found the indigo synthesis , as is often reported. Adolf von Baeyer succeeded in doing this in 1878, who also described the correct structural formula in 1883.

In 1885 he went on a study trip to the oil production area in the Caucasus , to Galicia , later to the Middle East ( Egypt ) and to North America . Engler took the view that crude oil was ultimately formed from animal fat in prehistoric times, which has long been one of the most widespread theses about crude oil formation and was underpinned by Engler through experiments in which he subjected fish oil and other animal fats to high pressure, which resulted in oil-like substances revealed. He detected cholesterols in petroleum and optically active substances, which enabled him to prove the petroleum's organic origin. At that time there were still competing theories of inorganic origin ( Dmitri Iwanowitsch Mendelejew , Alexander von Humboldt , Marcellin Berthelot ).

His later research focused on petroleum . In order to characterize it based on its viscosity , he developed the Engler viscometer around 1890 . The Engler normal distillation for the analysis of crude oil with the associated Engler apparatus consisting of Engler flasks with Liebig condenser is also named after him . Numerous trips have taken him to oil production areas in many parts of the world. Together with Hans Höfer , he published the six-volume work "Das Erdöl - Its Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Technology and Its Business" in 1919, in its second edition from 1927. He represented Germany several times at international oil conferences.

In addition, he researched, among other things, the properties of ozone .

Engler was politically active in the National Liberal Party and sat as its representative in the Reichstag from 1887 to 1890 , and in the First Chamber of the Baden Estates from 1890 to 1904 . He was significantly involved in the enforcement of the right to award doctorates for technical universities in Germany.

From 1903 Engler was a member of the BASF Supervisory Board .

Honors

The Carl Engler Medal , awarded by the German Scientific Society for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Coal (DGMK), is named after Engler . The vocational school for chemical professions in Karlsruhe also bears his name. The " Engler-Bunte-Institut " at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which still exists today, is named after Engler and Hans Bunte .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Life data, publications and academic family tree of Carl Oswald Viktor Engler at academictree.org, accessed on February 4, 2018.
  2. C. Engler: Standards for the viscometer. In: Journal for Applied Chemistry. 5, 1892, p. 725, doi : 10.1002 / anie.18920052402 .
  3. ^ Fritz Specht, Paul Schwabe: The Reichstag elections from 1867 to 1903. Statistics of the Reichstag elections together with the programs of the parties and a list of the elected representatives. 2nd Edition. Carl Heymann Verlag, Berlin 1904, p. 253.
  4. ^ Homepage of the Carl Engler School in Karlsruhe .
  5. ^ History of the Engler Bunte Institute .