Franz von Soxhlet

Franz von Soxhlet

Franz von Soxhlet (born January 13, 1848 in Brno , † May 5, 1926 in Munich ) was a German agricultural chemist .

Life

Soxhlet, son of a spinning manufacturer, studied agricultural chemistry at the University of Leipzig and received his doctorate there in 1872 with a thesis on the chemistry of milk. Subsequently (1873) he worked as a scientific assistant at the agricultural-chemical research station in Vienna . From 1879 he was a professor at the Technical University of Munich and (until 1913) head of the “Agricultural Central Experimental Station for Bavaria”. At the University of Halle he received his doctorate in medicine in 1894 . His research focus was the sterilization of milk , in 1886 he constructed an apparatus for the sterilization of milk for infants . Further results of his work were the so-called Soxhlet apparatus and the acidity measure SH value .

plant

The Soxhlet apparatus.

Advertisement for Soxhlets children's food from 1903.

Soxhlet first published studies on the biochemistry of milk in 1873 and on the formation of butter in 1876 . An important work in 1879 dealt with fats ( lipids ). The Soxhlet apparatus, which can be used to determine the fat content of dried foods, later emerged from this investigation.

In 1881 he developed a device which enabled the direct determination of the fat content of milk. The chemical composition of margarine was from Soxhlet's field in 1887. His main interest, however, was milk, for example, he examined milk sugar (1880, 1892) and acidity (1897).

At the beginning of the 1890s, Soxhlet assumed that his sterilization device could make milk completely sterile and thus caused a sensation among doctors and parents. Shortly afterwards, however, Carl Flügge demonstrated that even with Soxhlet's method, organisms remain in the milk that could multiply in a short time and harm the baby.

Regardless of this, Franz von Soxhlet is considered a pioneer in the pasteurization of milk. He was the first scientist to prove the milk proteins casein , albumin , globulin and lactoprotein as well as the milk sugar lactose . The difference between cow's milk and human milk was the subject of his research in 1893. From 1900 he studied the influence of calcium salts on the occurrence of the metabolic disorder rickets . In one of his last papers in 1912 von Soxhlet dealt with the relationship between the iron content in human and cow milk and the occurrence of anemia in children. He was an honorary doctor of the Medical Faculty of the University of Halle.

Soxhlet has always tried with boldness and severity to preserve the financial independence of the agricultural research stations. He became widely known in agriculture for his actions against the agricultural chemist Paul Wagner , the head of the agricultural research station in Darmstadt . He accused him of having falsified analysis results in favor of the fertilizer phosphate manufacturers (on the public dispute, see Paul Wagner).

Fonts (selection)

• The chemical differences between cow and human milk and the means of balancing them . Munich u. Zurich 1883.
• About children's milk and infant nutrition . Munich 1886.
• About margarine: Report to the General Committee of the Agricultural Association in Bavaria . Munich 1895.
• Enlightenment about the "propaganda" money of the potash indicator and my exclusion from the fertilizer committee of the German Agricultural Society . Munich 1910.

literature

• Herzfeld: Franz von Soxhlet † . In: Die Deutsche Zuckerindustrie vol. 51, 1926, pp. 501–502.
• Theodor Henkel: Franz von Soxhlet in memory . In: Süddeutsche Molkerei-Zeitung vol. 46, 1926, pp. 493–494 (with picture and list of publications).
• Werner E. Gerabek :  Soxhlet, Franz Ritter von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 606 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

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