Johann Ludwig Georg Meinecke

Johann Ludwig Georg Meinecke (born January 3, 1781 in Stadthagen ; † August 27, 1823 in Schkeuditz ) was a German scientist (mineralogy, chemistry) and professor of technology in Halle.

Life

Meinecke was the son of the Protestant pastor Hilmar Ernst Meinecke in Stadthagen. He studied in Halle with his doctorate in 1805 and was then teacher for mathematics and physics at the pedagogy in Halle until 1811. He was then professor of physics, chemistry and natural history at the Artillery School in Kassel and from 1814 full professor of technology at the University of Halle. He died by suicide.

From 1820 he was co-editor of JS Schweigger's journal for chemistry and physics.

Meinecke himself was mostly a theorist. In 1808 he published a textbook of mineralogy, in 1820 a mineralogical paperback for Germany and published on aragonite , a new sulfur iron from Dölau and Chrysopras . During his time at artillery school, he published on gunpowder and the casting of guns. In 1815 and more precisely in 1817 he found the Dulong-Petit law (four years before today's namesake). He evaluated the experiments of François Étienne Delaroche and Jacques Étienne Bérard on specific heats of gases and did not experiment himself.

He discovered organic isomerism before Justus Liebig and before Jöns Jakob Berzelius , but did not name them that way. He also influenced Liebig's radical theory .

Meinecke published an article in the Schweiggerschen Journal (Journal for Chemistry and Physics) in 1819 in which he grouped chemical elements according to relationships. Meinecke first listed three groups of related elements: barium and strontium ( barite and strontian ), calcium and magnesium ( lime and talc ), potassium and sodium ( potash and soda ). This was supplemented with further suggestions by other authors in the Schweiggerschen Journal and influenced the attempt to arrange the elements by the Basel pharmacist Johann Ludwig Falckner in 1824. Probably independently (according to Otto Krätz) of William Prout , he came up with the Prout hypothesis that elements are multiples of hydrogen. However, since he was not an atomist, he attached little importance to this discovery. Like Falckner later, he looked for mathematical relationships between elements (and connections) and was influenced by the romantic natural philosophy of that time in Germany.

His pioneering role and the Falckner's in the prehistory of the periodic table before Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (Triaden, 1829) was discovered in 1972 by Otto Krätz .

He was married to Henriette Susanne Dorothea Haccius (* 1763), the daughter of the linguist and pastor Georg Ludwig Haccius (1733-1817).

literature

• Otto Krätz: On the early history of the periodic system of the elements, in: RETE Strukturgeschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Volume 1, 1972, Issue 2, pp. 145–166
• Otto Krätz:  Meinecke, Johann Ludwig Georg. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 660 f. ( Digitized version ).
• R. Löw: Science and Zeitgeist, Johann Ludwig Georg Meinecke, a speculative natural scientist of the Romantic period, Janus, Volume 70, 1983, pp. 161-169.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Meinecke, Ueber den stoichiometric Werth der Korper, as an element of their chemical attraction, Journal für Chemie und Physik, Volume 27, 1819, pp. 39-47.