Friedrich Konrad Beilstein

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Friedrich Konrad Beilstein
obituary

Friedrich Konrad Beilstein (under the Russian name Фёдор Фёдорович Бейльштейн / Fedor Fedorovich Beilstein * February 5 jul. / 17th February  1838 greg. In St. Petersburg ; † October 5 . Jul / 18th October  1906 . Greg ibid) was a German-Russian chemist ( organic chemistry ).

Life

Friedrich Konrad Beilstein was born as the first of seven siblings to his German parents Karl Friedrich Beilstein and Katharina Margarete Rutsch in St. Petersburg, where the parents had taken over a tailoring workshop of his uncle Konrad Rutsch.

At the age of 15 he moved to Germany and studied chemistry a. a. at Bunsen and Kekulé in Heidelberg , Justus Liebig , with whom Beilstein is also related, in Munich and Wöhler in Göttingen , where he received his doctorate in 1858 with a dissertation “About Murexide ”. After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris (including with Charles Friedel and Charles Adolphe Wurtz ) and with Carl Löwig in Breslau (where he met his college friend from Heidelberg Lothar Meyer again), Beilstein became a lecturer in 1860 (habilitation 1860) and assistant to Wöhler and in 1865 an extraordinary assistant Professor in Göttingen. In 1866 he followed a (second) call to the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg (as successor to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev ); later he took Russian citizenship. In 1896 he gave up his professorship due to old age. In 1883 Beilstein was elected a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences . From 1888 he was also a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

In his research activities, Beilstein mainly dealt with aromatic compounds . So he found z. For example, in the chlorination of toluene in 1866, the important rule that the halogenation of alkylbenzenes in the heat mainly on the side chain (e.g. benzyl chloride ), in the cold or under the influence of a catalyst (e.g. iodine ) on the benzene nucleus ( ., for example chlorotoluene ) is carried out ( Merkspruch : S iedehitze, S may light → S eitenkette; K älte, K atalysator → K s).

Beilstein was the founder and first editor of the " Handbook of Organic Chemistry " (1st edition 1881), which as "The Beilstein" is still the standard work today. The "Beilstein" was his life's work, on which he worked for decades and whose first three editions he supervised and wrote alone. In 1896, due to the huge increase in organic chemical compounds and the associated literature, which a single individual could no longer cope with alone, the German Chemical Society took over the publication (headed by Paul Jacobson ). Under her direction, the third edition of the supplementary volumes appeared until 1906, and from 1918 the so-called “main work” (the fourth edition).

The Beilstein test for the detection of organic halogen compounds is named after him .

Works

  • (with P. Geitner): On the behavior of the homologues of benzene towards chlorine . Ann. Chem. U. Pharm., Vol. 139, pp. 331-342, 1866

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members of the previous academies. Friedrich Konrad Beilstein. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 19, 2015 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Beilstein, Friedrich Konrad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beilstein, Fyodor Fyodorowitsch; Бейльштейн, Фёдор Фёдорович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Russian chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1906
Place of death St. Petersburg