Julius Goldfinch

Julius Oscar Stieglitz (born May 26, 1867 in Hoboken , New Jersey , † January 10, 1937 ) was an American chemist.

Life

family

His parents were Edward Stieglitz (1833–1909) and Hedwig Ann Werner (1845–1922), both of whom were Jewish. Edward was from Gehaus . Hedwig had a cousin named Adolph Werner, who was a professor at the City College of New York . Julius had a twin brother named Leopold, who became a medic, and a brother named Alfred Stieglitz .

Julius went to kindergarten in New York City and also learned to play the cello in this city . Edward then moved to Karlsruhe for business reasons . There he attended the secondary school from 1881 and continued making music with the instrument intensively. He studied chemistry at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin, where he received his doctorate under Ferdinand Tiemann in 1889.

On August 27, 1891, he married Anna Stieffel from Constance . They had three offspring, all of whom were born in Chicago . Flora Elisabeth was born on August 10, 1893, but died the following day. Hedwig, born April 16, 1895, studied at the University of Chicago and Rush Medical College and worked in Hammond, Indiana, in ophthalmology. Edward , born June 6, 1899, studied at Rush Medical College, where he became an assistant professor and from 1938 medical advisor for the United States Department of Labor . Anna died in 1932.

On August 30, 1934, in Chicago, Julius married Mary M. Rising of Ainsworth, Nebraska , who was an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago. Rising had adopted a child named Katharine Menardi, who was also called Stieglitz after the wedding. Anna and Mary were Protestant. Julius held back on religious questions and favored the idea of ​​tolerance discussed in Nathan the Wise .

Act

His field of work was essentially organic chemistry. He made contributions to chemical indicators , the relationship between color and chemical structure, and chemical equilibrium.

After receiving his doctorate, he worked for a short time at the University of Göttingen under Victor Meyer . He then moved briefly to John Ulric Nef at Clark University . For two years he also worked on toxicological issues at Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer ) in Detroit . He was at the University of Chicago from 1892, where he became professor in 1905 and retired in 1933.

Findings on the Beckmann rearrangement were among the first of his numerous publications. Under his guidance, 118 students received their doctorate, including Otto Folin (1897), Emma P. Carr (1910), Agnes Fay Morgan (1914) and Dorothy Virginia Nightingale (1928).

During the First World War he was angry about " what the Prussians did to Germany " and therefore supported the position of the US government not only ideally, but also through research studies on sleeping pills, as well as novocaine and arsphenamine . He has attended several ammunition conferences at the Edgewood Arsenal .

In addition to research, he also worked for the American Medical Association and the United States Public Health Service for many years . He was also an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1911 and was Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and President of the American Chemical Society in 1917 . From 1917 to 1919 he was President of Sigma Xi .

Awards

• 1909: Honorary Doctorate from Clark University
• 1914: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1916: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh
• 1923: Willard Gibbs Medal

literature

• William Albert Noyes: Biographical Memoir of Julius Stieglitz. National Academy of Sciences, 1939.
• Herbert Newby McCoy: Julius Stieglitz. In: Journal of the American Chemical Society. Vol. 60, No. 3, 1938.

Web links

• Encyclopedia Britannica
• Florida Atlantic University Libraries: Jewish Heroes and Heroines in America