Eberhard Brauer

Eberhard Brauer (born February 8, 1875 in Leipzig , † May 1, 1958 in Großbothen ) was a German chemist.

Life

Brauer, whose father was a market helper, attended secondary school in Leipzig and was a school friend of Wolfgang (1883–1943) and Walter Ostwald , the sons of Wilhelm Ostwald , and was given early access to the Ostwald house in Leipzig. He saw Ostwald relatively seldom there, but drew attention to himself by building apparatus as a schoolboy (he originally wanted to be an engineer and there were several train drivers in his family) and Ostwald got him a scholarship to study chemistry, which he began in 1895. After completing his studies, he first worked in the analytical chemistry department with Julius Eugen Wagner . He received his doctorate from Ostwald in 1901 and became his private assistant in 1899. The dissertation ( On the electrical behavior of chromium when dissolving in acids ) was about the periodic behavior of dissolved metallic chromium observed by Ostwald , whereby Brauer examined the electrical behavior with a galvanometer and showed that chemical and electrical phenomena occurred simultaneously. Around 1900 he was also involved in Ostwald's attempts to generate ammonia from its elements in the presence of heated iron wire bundles. Initially promising, this soon ran into difficulties and Ostwald withdrew his patent (among other things, commercial iron already contained nitrogen). Brauer was then responsible for the technical side of the development of Ostwald's process for the production of nitric acid ( Ostwald process , oxidation of ammonia with platinum catalysts). From 1895 to 1902 he was an assistant at Ostwald in Leipzig, but in 1901 he was sent to Berlin for the industrial implementation of the ammonia oxidation process, initially in Niederlehme near Königs Wusterhausen in an abandoned powder factory, Griesheim (chemical factory Griesheim-Elektron near Frankfurt) and Gerthe near Bochum (large-scale plant on the Lothringen colliery from 1906). From 1905 he lived in Bochum and from 1908 nitric acid was regularly produced in Gerthe. A competitor (also in this area) was the Ostwald student Alwin Mittasch , who worked for BASF . Ostwald's side was defeated in the patent dispute, which Brauer later pointed out to their lack of skill in drafting patents. In 1907 he married the youngest daughter of Wilhelm Ostwald, Elisabeth (Elsbeth, 1884–1968), with whom he had four children. In 1909 he gave up the activity in Gerthe and founded an engineering office in Leipzig for nitric acid production and catalysis. During the First World War he was involved in development work on airplanes (in Gotha and with the Döberitz giant aircraft squadron) and the establishment of a chemical-analytical laboratory for the war raw materials department in Constantinople. From 1911 until his retirement in 1938 he worked for the Schimmel company in Miltitz near Leipzig, which manufactured fragrances, aromas and perfume ingredients. There he managed the distillation operation and later the analytical laboratory. The Brauer family lived there in a factory apartment. From 1938 the family lived in Großbothen on the Energie der Ostwalds estate. Thanks to his technical skills, Brauer was now mainly occupied with caretaker activities in the various villas of the residence, but was still occasionally active in science. In 1942, for example, he translated a Danish treatise by HG Koefoed on gasoline depletion during storage, attended the meetings of the Colloid Society and dealt with the third law of thermodynamics by Walter Nernst.

The son Georg Brauer (1908–2001) was professor of inorganic chemistry in Freiburg, Peter Sven Brauer (1911–1995) was professor of theoretical physics in Freiburg, Hellmut Brauer (1913–1940) was an engineering scientist and his daughter died in World War II Margarete (Gretel, 1918–2008) was an engineer for chemical apparatus construction and later an archivist and tour guide at the Ostwald estate.

literature

• Ulf Messow, Anna-Elisabeth Hansel: Eberhard Brauer - assistant and son-in-law of Wilhelm Ostwald , in: Mitteilungen der Wilhelm-Ostwald-Gesellschaft , Volume 24, 2019, Issue 1, pp. 39-49

Individual evidence

1. ^ Eberhard Brauer: How I came to know Wilhelm Ostwald , in: Journal of Chemical Education , Volume 30, December 1953, pp. 604-605
2. ^ Biographical information from Brauer in the commemorative publication 100 years of the Petrischule Leipzig, 1934
3. ↑ Brauer: The synthesis of nitric acid through the combustion of ammonia , in: Chemiker-Zeitung , Volume 1, 1937, pp. 19-20
4. ^ Website of the Ostwald family , Elisabeth Ostwald, with photo of the couple.