Johann Wolfgang Breitenbach

Johann Wolfgang Breitenbach (born June 22, 1908 in Vienna ; † January 6, 1978 ibid) was an Austrian chemist and full professor of physical chemistry at the University of Vienna . His specialty was plastics chemistry.

Life

After graduating from high school in 1927, Breitenbach studied physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna , but had to interrupt his studies for lack of money and do a dye apprenticeship. After continuing his studies, he received his doctorate in 1937 under Hermann Mark at the I. Chemical Laboratory of the University of Vienna on the subject of the kinetics of thermal polymerization reactions ( radical polymerization reactions with thermally induced radical formation). Breitenbach was employed at this institute, initially as a research assistant, until his death. In 1938 he became a university assistant. After Austria's annexation in 1938, both his PhD supervisor Mark and his friend and fellow student Rudolf Raff had to emigrate. He completed his habilitation in 1943 under Mark's successor, Ludwig Ebert, for physical chemistry and became head of the physical-chemical internship.

Breitenbach's research was declared important to the war effort, so that he was only drafted as a soldier in the last days of the war. Since he was formally a member of the NSDAP like more than half of his colleagues , he fell under the prohibition law of May 8, 1945, according to which party membership for lecturers at the university resulted in the automatic suspension of the license to teach. In the faculties, special commissions were set up to assess the lecturers, who had a certain amount of discretion. In a letter from the Dean's Office of the Philosophical Faculty to the Federal Ministry for Education on June 24, 1945, he is described as “valuable offspring for this rare subject”. During this time, Breitenbach lived without interruption in the I. Chemical Institute on Währinger Strasse, which was not destroyed in the war.

In the 1930s, German was the standard language in chemistry, in which, for example, Japanese researchers published their results. After the end of the war, Breitenbach discovered that many important research results were only available to him now and only in English. From 1950 he began to publish partly in English. In the Journal of Polymer Science founded by Hermann Mark in 1946 , in which he was later also a member of the editorial committee, there are both English and German-language articles by him, and most of his articles were still in German.

In 1951, Breitenbach received the title of associate professor, in 1954 he became associate professor. Since the mid-1950s, he has received research funding from DuPont , Dow Chemical , BASF and Ciba , among others , so that he could always keep his laboratory up to date. In 1965 he became a full professor for physical chemistry at the University of Vienna. From 1965 until his death in 1978 he was a co-director of the Physico-Chemical Institute, the former I. Chemical University Laboratory. He turned down the offer to become dean of the Philosophical Faculty because he could no longer devote himself to his research.

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• Johannes Feichtinger: The Vienna School of High Polymer Research in England and America: Emigration, Scientific Change and Innovation , Graz 2000
• Otto Kratky, Johann Wolfgang Breitenbach: Obituary (with list of publications), Almanac of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 128th year (1978), 311–330
• Wolfgang L. Reiter & Reinhard Schurawitzki (2005), Continuity across breaks. Physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna after 1945 - a first approximation, in: Margarete Grandner, Gernot Heiss, Oliver Rathkolb (eds.), Future with contaminated sites: The University of Vienna 1945 to 1955, Studienverlag Innsbruck, Vienna, Munich, Bozen, p . 236-259. (printed with the support of the Federal Ministry of Education, the Cultural Office of the City of Vienna and the University of Vienna)