Ernst Mohr (chemist)

Ernst Wilhelm Max Mohr (born May 30, 1873 in Dresden , † March 7, 1926 in Heidelberg ) was a German chemist ( organic chemistry ). He was a pioneer of stereochemistry and conformation theory ( Sachse-Mohr theory ), which only developed more strongly decades after his death.

He was the son of the civil engineer Christian Otto Mohr , attended grammar school in Dresden and studied chemistry at the TH Dresden from 1891 with the diploma in 1893, where Rudolf Schmitt was his teacher. After military service as a one-year volunteer, he continued his studies from 1894 at the TH Dresden (final examination 1896), where he dealt with organic chemistry of nitrogen under Ernst von Meyer . Since he could not then a doctorate at the Technical University of Dresden, he went to University of Kiel , where he in 1897 Theodor Curtius doctorate was (via the action of diacetonitrile for aldehydes) . He was Curtius's assistant and followed him to Bonn and Heidelberg and completed his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1900 (amines of the pyridine series) . He was a private lecturer and from 1906 an unscheduled associate professor, but in 1908 he fell ill with a spinal cord disease that led to progressive paralysis, so that he had to give up experimental research in 1914 (before that he had known how to help himself with assistants and students). Afterwards he worked theoretically and gave lectures on stereochemistry at home. In the summer semester of 1923 he was still teaching. It was last published in 1924. He endured his suffering with great calm and quickly fell into disrepair after his wife died.

He was particularly interested in theoretical organic structural chemistry. As a private lecturer, he also gave lectures on chemical computing (using the slide rule). He experimented with the Hofmann rearrangement . In 1915, in stereochemistry, he took up an idea from Hermann Sachse that cyclohexane exists in two spatially different, stable forms. With his explanation, he also expanded the theory of Baeyer tension . His prediction of two tension-free, stable forms of decalin was confirmed by Walter Hückel around 1925 . Afterwards, this theory of conformations was called the Sachse-Hermann theory. He also considered the structure of the diamond and the relationship with its properties.

From 1902 to 1910 he edited the 8th to 10th editions of August Bernthsen's textbook on organic chemistry (for example the sections on tautomerism and isocyclic compounds, that is, with ring structures only made of carbon), and from 1911 to 1916 he wrote reviews (progress of organic Chemie) for the Chemiker-Zeitung in order to improve his salary.

Fonts

• with Hermann Sachse: On the conformation of cyclohexane. Ostwald's Classics of Exact Sciences , 274.

Web links

• Biography of Alexander Kipnis