Franz Carl Achard
Franz Carl Achard - in a different spelling François Charles Achard (A`schàr) - (born April 28, 1753 in Berlin , † April 20, 1821 in Kunern , not far from Winzig , province of Silesia ) was a German scientist , a descendant of French religious refugees. He developed the technique of making sugar from white fodder beet . In 1801 he had the world's first functioning beet sugar factory built in Kunern and thus in Prussia .
Private life
The early years
Achard came from a family of socially highly respected and financially well-off Huguenots . The ancestors had fled the Dauphiné in southeastern France to Geneva after the Edict of Tolerance of Nantes was revoked in 1685 . Achard's father studied theology in Geneva and came to Berlin in 1743. There members of the family held prominent positions as lawyers , theologians and bankers , also as members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . Guillaume Achard got a job at the Werder Church in the French colony . He died in 1755, just two years after the birth of his son. His widow Marguerite married the tapestry maker Charles Vigne in 1759 .
Little is known about Achard's childhood and youth. He had probably acquired scientific knowledge as an autodidact and started working in this field at the age of 19. In 1774, at the age of 21, he was accepted into the Society of Friends of Natural Scientists in Berlin . The company's files note that “this gentleman can only live on his money and only work to his liking”. In 1775 Achard sent examples of his scientific investigations to King Friedrich II and, with his benevolent support, received a position as an employee at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, in the chemistry laboratory of Andreas Sigismund Marggraf . However, he was not granted a salary until 1778, after repeated requests and advocacy from colleagues.
Complicated relationships
At the time of his employment, i.e. still without his own income, Achard was pursuing marriage plans, obviously against strong opposition in his environment. The bride came from a middle-class background, had no wealth, did not belong to the French Reformed Church, was nine years older than her bridegroom, divorced and mother of a daughter from her first marriage. Achard's family viewed the connection as a blatant mesalliance . Even Jean Henri Samuel Formey , permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, admonished the young man to remember his big name and not to offend his family. Finally, on September 20, 1776, Achard wrote directly to the king: “To avoid the diversions and wastes which are almost inextricably linked to the life of a bachelor and which prove so dangerous to those who devote themselves to study, I beg your Majesty very much respectfully to show me the grace that I am allowed to unite by marrying Maria Louisa Kühn, born in Frankfurt an der Oder . ... Some people in my family ... are completely dissatisfied with my choice. "In his brief reply, Friedrich informed the supplicant," that because of his marriage he can keep it as he wants and does not have to ... inquire about it by adding his It does not concern your Majesty. "
Achard assessed this decision as approval. He married on October 20, 1776 - a surprise for the family and also for the French parish, because the wedding ceremony took place in the garrison church, in the parish of the military population. There, questions of social status and bourgeois life models were traditionally viewed more generously than elsewhere, especially than among the French Reformed. The French community also subsequently authorized this marriage. The family's disapproval found concrete expression in the fact that various wills were changed to the detriment of the newlywed.
The marriage did not last long, in 1783 the wife demanded a divorce . After a rejection by the court of the French colony, an unsuccessful date of reconciliation and a fruitless appeal to the king, who referred the matter back to the courts, the marriage was finally divorced; the exact date is not known. As a result, Achard's private life became even more complicated. He began an extramarital relationship with his stepdaughter ; the 17-year-old had a daughter in 1787 and then a son from her stepfather in 1791 . The process was perceived as a scandal, Achard's relatives and colleagues kept their distance.
At that time Achard lived in Berlin's Dorotheenstadt, and from 1792 also on his estate in French Buchholz . It is not possible to say exactly how long he lived with his stepdaughter. It is documented for 1796 that he had a cohabitation with a domestic servant with whom he also had two children and who ran a joint household until at least 1801. In 1802 he left Berlin to pursue his project for a beet sugar factory in Kunern in Lower Silesia in Prussia . There he lived with his four legitimate children, most likely without the two mothers.
Working life
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Scientific activities
Achard worked as a physicist , chemist, and biologist on a variety of very different problems. Such a thing was still possible in the scientific community at the time and was therefore not unusual in principle, and the Prussian Academy of Sciences was still structured on an interdisciplinary basis . Achard was elected director of the physical class there in 1782 as Marggraf's successor. Its versatility and activity went far beyond the usual. His frequent financial difficulties also played a part. He went into debt for his experiments and for private needs, and he had to pledge his substantial salary . He could no longer count on material support from the extended family, which is why the hope of a quick financial return often determined the choice of his fields of work. In this way, he occasionally raised doubts among colleagues and observers about the scientific seriousness of his undertakings.
Research into electricity has been a fashionable scientific topic since Luigi Galvani's experiments . Achard repeated the experiments, carried out experiments he had thought of himself - including unsuccessful efforts to cure deafness with electric shocks - and reported them to the king, including the hope that the electrical force could help to influence the disorder of the nervous system . . Frederick replied: "... If you manage to gain by electricity dumb mind, you are worth more than your weight in gold ..." Achard examined different types of gases , developed oxygen blowing , bringing with them the metals to melt and healthier air to bring into the hospital room of the Charité , researched metals and minerals and published a tabular work on it. He succeeded for the first time in melting platinum .
At the request of the king, he worked in the 1780s because native plants for their usefulness for dyeing of textiles to investigate the cost of importing expensive foreign dyes to reduce possible. He made Berlin dyers familiar with innovations and subtleties of the trade in lectures; he had to repeat the series of lectures several times. Like other members of the Academy, Achard gave public lectures in the evenings on the subjects of his research. His events were extremely popular. With vivid experiments, he promoted knowledge, above all about physical processes, and interest in them - a preliminary stage of Berlin university operations . In 1778 Achard was elected a member of the Leopoldina learned society . Achard undertook cultivation experiments with English and French grass varieties, with which the feed supply of farm animals should be improved. And again on behalf of Frederick II, on a test area of about five acres in Lichtenberg near Berlin, he researched the possibilities of making foreign tobacco varieties at home in Prussia or of refining local varieties, in the words of the King, “to see how it is here successful and whether it should continue to operate on a large scale ”. Concrete results are not known, but the king must have been satisfied, because he had Achard remitted a pension of 500 thalers a year - "for his services to improve the domestic tobacco culture".
In 1795 Achard constructed a portable field telegraph and tested it between Spandau and Berlin. The year before, the first optical telegraph line had been set up between Paris and Lille , using a system of mechanical signaling elements with movable arms. Achard now proposed that messages should be conveyed with the help of geometrical figures. He translated 2,375 words and phrases into such characters and entered them in a Franco-German telegraph lexicon . He was unsuccessful, couriers continued to be used in Prussia because they delivered results even at night and with poor visibility. But the Frenchman Claude Chappe , the real inventor, took his own life in 1805 after publicly disputing his priority in his work.
Achard had lightning rods installed on several private houses in Berlin, as well as on the German and French cathedral . He found out about the successful attempts of the Montgolfier brothers with hot air balloons and only months later, around the turn of the year 1783/84, he sent several gas and air-filled balloons into the Berlin sky. His audience, which had previously been asked for donations, was disappointed: balloons landed in an invisible distance, others burst as they went up. Overall, however, Achard, who was also entrusted with organizational and administrative tasks at the academy and who often worked to the point of complete exhaustion, was a publicly recognized, even famous man, a member of numerous scientific societies at home and abroad. The Kgl. The Bavarian Academy of Sciences, for example, had appointed him a foreign member in 1778.
Sugar production
In all of his work, Franz Carl Achard was more of an experimenter and organizer than a theorist . So it was only logical that it achieved its greatest impact and its place in history through the development of a new technology and its testing in (pre) industrial practice. In 1747 his teacher, the chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf , first demonstrated the sugar content of beetroot and presented his discovery in a lecture at the academy, but did not pursue this approach any further. Achard very likely knew the research results.
In 1782 he took up the subject and bought the small Kaulsdorf estate in northeast Berlin. There he began the following year with his attempts to "extract sugar from European plants with advantage". He grew many different plants, examined them for their suitability and decided on the beet in order to optimize them for his purposes through further breeding. After a break of a few years - Kaulsdorf burned down in 1786 - Achard continued his experiments in 1792, now on his estate in French Buchholz near Berlin. In a petition dated January 11, 1799, he shared King Friedrich Wilhelm III. with that he was now confident that he could extract sugar from beets and asked for a larger loan . Achard also saw beet sugar as a weapon against the slavery he hated.
He added a sample of the refined sugar obtained in the Berlin sugar boiler . The king and his advisors recognized the potential of this project and only four days later approved the considerable sum of 50,000 thalers. Achard then acquired the Kunern estate, located near the Oder , from Count Maximilian von Pückler and had the new technical systems he developed installed in three existing buildings (on the eastern hill of Oberkunern). 250 tons of beets from the harvest of 1801 were processed in the sugar factory from April 1802 and delivered the finished product with a yield of four percent.
In 1807, during the war with France, the factory and some buildings on the estate fell victim to a fire, Achard was ruined and had to go into debt. The king assumed his obligations in 1810 and demanded the establishment of a training institute for the production of beet sugar. For this purpose, a new, smaller-scale sugar factory was built between Dorfstrasse and the castle, supplemented by a building as a dormitory. Teaching began in January 1812. Achard's health was meanwhile badly affected. As early as 1815, the school, where foreign students were taught, had to be closed. He spent the last years of his life under oppressive conditions. He died on April 20, 1821, impoverished and forgotten for the time being. Only in the issue of the Schlesische Zeitung of April 28, 1821 did the family publish an obituary notice. No obituary from any of the many learned societies honored Achard's life and merits. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Herrnmotschelnitz (since 1945 Moczydlnica Dworska, now part of the urban and rural community of Wohlau / Wołów). The family had an obelisk set. In 1886, on the initiative of the Association for the Beet and Sugar Industry of the German Empire, the grave was converted into a crypt, which was closed with a memorial stone. After 1945 the cemetery was no longer occupied.
In the 1980s, a decision was made to thoroughly restore the now damaged obelisk, which was then carried out in 1984 in Wrocław. Then it was brought to the Wołów Museum and exhibited. In connection with the anniversaries in 2002/2003 (200 years of the Kunern sugar factory, 250th birthday of Achard), the plan to restore the cemetery in Herrnmotschelnitz was drawn up. This took place in the years 2009-10 through funds from the Polish sugar industry (including Südzucker Polska SA) and concerned paths, entrances, walls and, above all, the grave site of Achard. For this purpose, the new obelisk with the old German inscriptions was erected and the surrounding area was designed as a memorial. In the other graves, stone remains and borders have been preserved. The cleared cemetery has been a listed building since then.
The castle burned down in 1945, and the bricks from the Lehr sugar factory were later used in the village. In 1964, the Polish government built a memorial to Achard on the preserved foundation walls of the (second) factory, and in the building of the former Berlin Sugar Museum, a bust on the entrance portal commemorated his work until November 2012 . It was returned to the Märkisches Museum in Berlin (illustration at the beginning of the biography). Since 2015 there has been a permanent exhibition "Alles Zucker!" In the German Museum of Technology in Berlin, which pays tribute to Achard's work.
Effects and evaluations
Very soon, in Germany with some delay until the 1830s, sugar production developed into a flourishing, highly efficient industry on the basis of what Achard had devised and practiced. It set the pace for various production processes in the early machine age. Extraction , filtration , evaporation and crystallization , centrifuge technology , drying and multiple use of exhaust steam could also be used in other branches of industry.
The industrial production of beet sugar threatened and finally ended the sugar monopoly of the cane sugar producing colonial powers . Even at the beginning of this development there had apparently been attempts to bribe Achard. At least one historical source reports that English cane sugar manufacturers offered him up to 200,000 thalers in the event that he declared his small-scale experiments to be definitely unsuitable for industrial evaluation and stopped working on them.
Achard's eventful private life is the focus of a case study on “Marriage and living in a community at the end of the 18th century”. First of all, figures show that in the last third of the 18th century Berlin saw a remarkable decrease in the percentage of marriages and a corresponding increase in illegitimate children. The doctor Ludwig Formey notes that this is especially true for the "thinking class, since the other abandons themselves to the natural instincts without worrying about the purpose and the consequences of marriage ...". The biography Achard is used to control the behavior of the environment - family, church, fellow citizens - on deviation of marriage practices in the academic milieu to light.
Judgments from contemporaries
After Achard had sent a request for salary to King Friedrich II on November 15, 1777, he had the answer in a cabinet order on November 16, 1777: “Since the king does not sufficiently know the talents and literary merits of his academician Achard, His Majesty wishes that his Academy of Sciences made it particularly known to him so that a decision can be made on Achard's original application ”.
The academy directors Marggraf, Lagrange, Merian and Sulzer reported on November 18, 1777: “Your Majesty has ordered us to inform you of the talents and academic merit of Mr. Achard. We can only give him the most beneficial testimony in this regard. ... As a student of Director Marggraf in chemistry, he has made considerable progress in this science, for which he is truly passionate. No less has he distinguished himself in other branches of experimental physics, in which there is nothing that escapes him and in which he spares neither effort nor expense, and even pays no attention to his health. He has already delivered treatises in all these areas which have met with approval from those in the know ... "
Academician Dieudonneé Thiébault wrote in his memoirs of Achard: “I saw him stand in his laboratory nine times for 24 hours in a row to follow the same experiment. I have seen how he defied all the rigors of the season and spent whole days examining his methods of perfecting tobacco culture and thus, from the results he obtained, compiled 23,000 rule of three under field conditions. He showed us a plan of 40,000 experiments to be carried out in order to be able to dismantle or assemble all known types of rock at will. After all, I saw how he presented many cleverly conceived and precisely working as well as useful machines to the academy, etc. Monsieur Achard has achieved a lot because he has as much perseverance as he has zeal and because with these advantages he is completely devoted to science. "
(The originals of the three texts quoted were in French.)
Works (selection)
- European sugar production from beetroot, in connection with the preparation of rum, vinegar, and a coffee substitute from their waste, 3 parts. Reprint of the 1809 edition. Bartens, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-87040-034-X .
- Sugar and syrup production from beetroot. Breslau 1810, 2nd edition 1813
Achard has published over 240 scientific papers, including 60 on beet sugar.
Honors
- Member of 29 national and international societies, including:
- 1774 member of the "Natural Research Society of Berlin"
- 1778 member of the mathematics section of the Leopoldina "National Academy of Sciences in Halle (Saale)"
- 1778 foreign member of the Königl. Bavarian Academy of Sciences
- 1811/1812 honorary member of the Königl. Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin
- 1811 gold medal from the Société d'agriculture de la Seine in Paris
- 1886 Foundation of a commemorative plaque and redesign of the grave by the Association for the Beet and Sugar Industry of the German Empire
- 1892 bronze commemorative plaque with the relief bust of Achard (sculptor Ferdinand Lepcke, donated at the instigation of Prof. Scheibler) on the front of the house at Dorotheenstrasse 10 in Berlin
- 1900 Establishment of an "Achard Foundation" by the Association of the German Sugar Industry (foundation capital: 12,000 gold marks; ended by inflation).
- 1911 Discovery of the building of the former teaching sugar factory in Kunern
- Street names in Mainz, Berlin-Kaulsdorf (since 1934) and Laatzen near Hanover
- 1993 sponsorship for the elementary school in Berlin-Kaulsdorf
- 1964 Design of the site of the former sugar factory in Kunern with a relief and the first plaque
- 1980 Foundation of the "Franz-Carl-Achard-Medal" by the Academy of Sciences of the GDR to honor outstanding achievements in the field of technical and technological sciences; it was awarded until 1989.
- 1992 special postage stamp for the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Sugar Institute in Berlin with a silhouette picture of Achard (made by Jean-Yves Dousset after the bronze busts in the Sugar Museum Berlin),
- 1993 Brass plaque on the manor house of the former estate in Kaulsdorf b. Berlin
- 1997 another plaque in the village street of Kaulsdorf near Berlin
- 1999 Foundation of a coin of honor with the portrait of Franz Carl Achard for long-standing members of the Association of German Sugar Technicians
- 2002 Exhibition of the Wohlau Museum in the Leubus Monastery (Klasztor Lubiaz) on the 200th anniversary of the start of sugar production in the Kunern factory with a new obelisk
- 2002 Publication of an extensive biography about Achard by Hans-Heinrich Müller and two other authors.
- 2002 second plaque on the memorial of the former sugar factory next to the relief: “In memory of 200 years of beet sugar industry”. Konary 2002.
- 2009-10 restoration of the cemetery in Herrnmotschelnitz (Moczydlnica Dworska) and especially of Achard's grave
- since 2015 there has been the permanent exhibition of the German Museum of Technology “Alles Zucker! Food - Material - Energy ”with 7 parts.
literature
- Jakob Baxa: Achard, Franz Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 27 f. ( Digitized version ).
- Wolfgang Böhm: Biographical manual on the history of crop production . Munich 1997, pp. 1-2.
- Hans-Heinrich Müller et al .: Franz Carl Achard, 1753-1821. Bartens, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-87040-087-0 .
- Alfred Neubauer: The sweet salt, François Charles Achard and the beet sugar. In: Hellersdorfer Heimathefte. No. 5, ed. from the district chronicle Berlin-Hellersdorf and Heimatverein Hellersdorf, Kaulsdorf, Mahlsdorf e. V .; Mazz-Verlag, Berlin 1997.
- Hubert Olbrich : Achard, Franz Carl. 200 years of beet sugar . In: Communications from the Association for the History of Berlin . In: Yearbook of the Association for the History of Berlin , ISSN 0522-0033 , 2002, issue 2.
- Alphons Oppenheim: Achard, Franz Karl . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 27 f.
- Max Speter: Bibliography of magazines, newspaper books, brochures and the like. Publications by Franz Carl Achards . In: Die Deutsche Zuckerindustrie , Volume 63, 1938, pp. 69–74, 152–154, 515–318, 407–409 and 592–593.
- Wilhelm Stieda: Franz Karl Achard and the early days of the German sugar industry . Verlag S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1928 ( digitized version ).
- Gerhard Webersinn: The Silesian sugar industry . In: Yearbook of the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau , Volume XVIII. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin S. 1973, 140-211.
- Jürgen Wilke: "It's not unusual in Berlin ..." Marriage and life in a community at the end of the 18th century - a case study . (PDF) In: Historical Social Research , Vol. 28, 2003, No. 3, urn : nbn: de: 0168-ssoar-50596
- Günther Wolff: Franz Karl Achard, born April 28, 1753 - died April 20, 1821. At the same time a contribution to the cultural history of sugar. In: Medical monthly journal , Volume 7, 1953, pp. 253f.
- Horst-Dieter Loebner: The Silesian beet sugar production; Sugar factories and sugar industry in Silesia . St. Katharinen 2005, XIX, 432 p .; New edition 2005.
- Andrzej Wilk: Akcja cmentarze - Zapomniany Gròb - (Action Cemetery - Forgotten Grave: Achard and his grave). In: Encounters with Monuments , No. 3, 2002.
- Andrzej Wilk: Franz Karl Achard i początki cukrownictwa buraczanego na ziemi wołowskiej . Wołów 2002.
- Andrzej Wilk: Personal communications . January, February and May 4, 2020.
- Hartmut Boettcher: Franz Carl Achard, the founder of beet sugar production, died 200 years ago. In: Wohlau-Steinauer Heimatblatt, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 23rd year, 2021, issue 4, pp. 11-12.
Movie
- Sugar without slave labor. TV report, Germany, 2015, 4:44 min., Script and direction: Iduna Wünschmann, moderation: Gerald Meyer , production: rbb , editing: Theodor. Story n aus der Mark , first broadcast: December 6, 2015 at rbb, summary by Theodor ( Memento from December 7, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ), video. rbb.
Web links
- Literature by and about Franz Carl Achard in the catalog of the German National Library
- Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Source texts for Franz Carl Achard. ( Memento from May 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- Some of Achard's inventions and experiments. In: German Technology Museum Berlin, Dept. Sugar Museum.
- Correspondence with Frederick the Great
- Works by Achard on Google Books, several full texts
- Photo series on the teaching sugar factory in Kunern with texts
- Photo series on the cemetery in Herrnmotschelnitz with texts
Individual evidence
- ^ Member entry by Franz Carl Achard at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on November 22, 2015.
- ^ Member entry by François Charles Achard . (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on July 17, 2017.
- ↑ Sugar cane and slavery . In: Deutsches Museum , accessed on July 17, 2017.
- ↑ What is sugar? Food sugar ( Memento from February 12, 2005 in the Internet Archive ; MS Word )
- ^ Achard grave site - obelisk from 1821
- ↑ Achard grave site - new obelisk
- ^ Achard grave site - back of the new obelisk
- ↑ Entrance to the Herrnmotschelnitz cemetery (2010)
- ↑ Former castle in Oberkunern
- ^ Former training sugar factory in Kunern from 1812
- ^ Memorial for Achard in Kunern from 1964 and 2002
- ↑ Achardstrasse. In: Street name dictionary of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near Kaupert )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Achard, Franz Carl |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Achard, François Charles; Achard, Franz Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German natural scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 28, 1753 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 20, 1821 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Kunern , Silesia |