Max Schroeder

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Max Schroeder (* before 1854, † after 1927) was a German chemist known for his contributions to the industrial production of sulfuric acid .

Schroeder had a doctorate in chemistry and at the beginning of the 1880s was a chemist at a zinc smelter in Upper Silesia, where the idea occurred to him to dissolve the sulfur dioxide from the roasted zinc blende , which was simply allowed to escape into the air in the zinc smelters, in water in countercurrent systems and so make it sulphurous To produce acid . He developed a technical process supported by the engineer Emil Hänisch and had it patented. Since he had no funds of his own, he looked for an investor and finally found him in Julius Grillo (1849-1911) in his zinc works in Hamborn. It was implemented there around 1885 and from then on, large quantities of liquid sulfuric acid came on the market, and soon afterwards he also found a method of producing inexpensive fuming sulfuric acid ( oleum ) from it, which he also patented. The need was particularly high in the paint industry and the main source until then was the Starck factories in Bohemia, which extracted the sulfuric acid from the distillation of alum shale in iron retorts and sent it in clay jugs, which was completely inadequate for the chemical industry. As an alternative, a costly method according to C. Winkler was used in the paint factories (with precisely measured amounts of sulfur dioxide and oxygen).

The Schroeder process , which is considerably more cost-effective than the Winkler process, was licensed to BASF , who implemented it in a large plant in 1887. The construction was led by Schroeder and the operations manager A. Knietsch made significant improvements (instead of producing the sulfurous acid in pure form, he worked with the roasting gases, which, as was customary at the time, passed through platinum catalysts in asbestos).

The sulphurous acid from the Grillo company found more and more sales in other areas, despite the modified process in the paint industry. However, due to a license agreement with BASF, Schroeder was not allowed to work on the further development of oleum production for ten years. Schroeder had resigned from his old company (v. Giesche's Erben) due to patent disputes and went to the Rietschen cellulose factory in 1883 and soon after switched to a large Berlin company for laboratory chemicals. However, he continued to work on the direct production of oleum from roasting gases and, after the 10 years had passed, he went public with a process that replaced the asbestos carrier of the platinum catalyst with a substance that was soluble in water (anhydrous magnesium sulfate), from which the catalyst was easily converted could be recovered. The Grillo-Schroeder method was used worldwide, especially in England and the USA.

Schroeder had been a private citizen since the 1890s, but continued to work on his inventions and lived in Berlin.

In 1924 he received the Liebig commemorative coin for his contributions to industrial sulfuric acid production .

literature

  • F. Raschig: Awarded the Liebig Memorial Medal. Max Schroeder and his inventions: Liquid sulfur dioxide and oleum, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, 1924, p. 408

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Rasch's report in the journal for applied chemistry on the occasion of the Liebig commemorative coin in 1924, he is described as a sprightly man in his seventies
  2. ↑ Hänisch was released there for this reason. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, Volume 45, 1932, p. 193
  3. ^ Rasch, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, 1924, then private citizen for over 30 years
personal data
SURNAME Schroeder, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH before 1854
DATE OF DEATH after 1927