Hans Rupe (chemist)

Johannes HW "Hans" Rupe (born October 9, 1866 in Basel ; † January 12, 1951 there ) was a Swiss chemist and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Basel .

Life

His father Johannes Rupe was a businessman and, like his mother, came from Westphalia (Minden). Rupe became interested in chemistry and botany early on, stimulated by his father, who had studied chemistry. He vacillated between biology and chemistry and turned to chemistry under the influence of his uncle Charles A. Joy . After graduating from high school in 1885, he studied chemistry in Basel (with Julius Piccard ), Strasbourg (with Friedrich Rose and Rudolf Fittig ) and from 1887 on the advice of his uncle Joy (who lived in Munich and was friends with Baeyer) in Munich with Adolf von Baeyer , in which he received his doctorate in 1889 ( on the reaction products of dichloromuconic acid ). In 1894 he became a lecturer at the School of Chemistry in Mulhouse , habilitated in 1895 in Basel and taught from 1899 at the University of Basel, in 1903 as an associate professor and from 1912 as the successor to Rudolf Nietzki Full Professor of Organic Chemistry (while his colleague Friedrich Fichter after Division of the chemistry chair when Nietzki took over the chair for inorganic chemistry when he retired). In 1915 he was rector of the university. In 1937 he retired.

He dealt with organic-preparative chemistry and especially with color chemistry. In 1918 he published a new nickel- based catalyst for hydrogenation, the Rupe nickel named after him. Further areas of work were terpenes , camphor and ethynyl carbinol rearrangement (a variant of the Meyer-Schuster rearrangement named after Rupe).

In 1901 he was one of the founders and from 1907 to 1909 President of the Swiss Chemical Society . Rupe was a member of the editorial team of the Helvetica Chimica Acta magazine for many years . In 1932 he became a member of the Leopoldina

In 1907 he married Margaretha Hagenbach, daughter of the physicist Eduard Hagenbach-Bischoff , and had three children with her. In 1936 he married Margaretha Lutz as a widower.

Fonts (selection)

• Instructions for experimenting in the organic chemistry lecture . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1909, 2nd edition 1930.
• Adolf von Baeyer as a teacher and researcher. Memories from his private laboratory . F. Enke, Stuttgart 1932.

literature

• H. Dahn, T. Reichstein: Hans Rupe. 1866-1951 . In: Helvetica Chimica Acta Volume 35, 1951, pp. 1–28 (with list of publications) doi : 10.1002 / hlca.19520350102 .

Web links

• Hermann Wichers : Rupe, Hans. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Beginnings of chemistry at the University of Basel

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to Römpp Chemielexikon .
2. ↑ Member entry of Hans Rupe at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 15, 2016.