Max Speter

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Max Speter (born April 1, 1883 in Bistritz , Transylvania , † June 30, 1942 in Berlin ) was a German chemist and historian of chemistry.

Life

Max Speter was the son of Johann and Anna Dollberg Speter. His parents raised him in the Jewish faith and gave him a broad and in-depth education. He attended the German grammar school in Bistritz, which he successfully left at the age of 17. He then spent one semester at the Technical University in Budapest , four semesters in a similar institute in Hanover and two in Munich , where he finally received his diploma in mechanical engineering after a total of seven (instead of the usual eight) semesters . Speter's scientific career began when, at the age of 21, he became the assistant to Oskar von Miller , the founder of the Deutsches Museum . He helped von Miller to compile and arrange chemical, physical and mineralogical exhibitions. Due to his cooperation with the Munich-based equipment company von Bender and Hobein, the young Speter attended the universities of Austria, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. He also worked for some time as a chemist in Raab (Hungary), where he worked on molasses, alcohol and potash .

After the death of his father, Speter became Richard Joseph Meyer's assistant at the University of Berlin and developed methods for separating the elements thorium and scandium . He discovered a separation method using double sodium scandium carbonate, which was published together with Meyer.

In 1910, under the responsibility of Walther Nernst and Hans Heinrich Landolt , Max Speter was awarded his doctorate by the University of Berlin. The topic of his dissertation, which he himself had chosen, was " Lavoisier and his precursors ".

During the inflation from 1920 to 1923 Speter lost his property and worked as a worker in Pirna . As head of a warehouse, he developed and published a system for storing scrap. Due to the lack of a laboratory, he carried out chemical and electrostatic experiments in the kitchen of his house in Wehlen on the Elbe.

From 1934 onwards, the state restricted Speter's development opportunities due to his denomination . Nevertheless, scientific articles continued to appear in some German and foreign journals. Many of these posts appeared anonymously. On July 22, 1937, a lecture by Speters on the history of chemistry was to be broadcast on German radio. The lecture was recorded but not broadcast. Later, Speter was informed that the records had been destroyed. From 1939 Speter could no longer publish in Germany.

Max Speter committed suicide on June 30, 1942.

Create

Scientific work

As assistant to RJ Meyer at the University of Berlin, Speter developed a process for separating scandium and thorium using double sodium scandium carbonate. The results were published together with RJ Meyer. In the two years after 1910, Speter and a friend ran a tungsten laboratory in Berlin-Charlottenburg and developed a tungsten metal paste for coating filaments in light bulbs . The drawn tungsten filaments from the General Electric Company, however, pushed the coated ones out of the market. Speter published work on the production of phosphorous acid from phosphorus and bleach, on the precipitation of zirconium picrate, and on his electrostatic observations. In addition, he developed and patented a disinfection lamp.

Literary work

Literary publications

Max Speter's interest in literature began in his youth. While attending the German Gymnasium in Bistritz, he read all of the (translated) works by Mark Twain and Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus . This especially piqued his interest, so he carefully studied all of his works. He spent three years searching various archives and libraries in Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, England, France and Sweden to find biographical information about Grimmelhausen. In 1927 he presented his research results in the form of a long manuscript to the Society of Bibliophiles in Weimar. An illustrated article on the same subject appeared eight years later in the Philobiblon . In 1927 an illustrated article about the last days of the alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser appeared in the magazine for book lovers . In the fifth edition of the journal for the history of science Osiris , Speter published a 72-page article " Father Kopp " about Hermann Kopp . The article is based on Kopp's 306 letters to Justus von Liebig , which Speter discovered in the Liebig archives in Munich.

In 1909 Speter and E. Ichenhäuser published a brochure about Jean Rey's experiments on the calcination of tin and lead . In the following year Speter edited the physico-chemical articles by Michail Wassiljewitsch Lomonossow and translated with V. Ortwed SM Jörgensen's book about the discovery of oxygen from Danish into German.

In 1911 the first edition of Speter's first book "Diechemische Grundstoffe" appeared. It was the eighth part of a series for Reclam's Universal Library . The second edition appeared in 1914. In 1913 Speter brought out a book on "The chemical relationship and its relationship to the other forms of energy".

In the “ Book of the Great Chemists ” there are seven chapters (those on Hermann Boerhaave , Étienne François Geoffroy , Andreas Sigismund Marggraf , Franz Carl Achard , Joseph Black , Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier and Thomas Graham ) that come from Speter.

Scientific publications

Max Speter published a variety of articles in chemical and technical journals dealing with superphosphates , plastics , sugars , scientific equipment, life-saving equipment, explosives and photography . Some of the articles on superphosphate were printed in three columns: in German, French and English. In addition to German magazines, his articles have also appeared in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and the United States.

For the series of articles for the specialist journal Superphosphate , Speter studied patents, scientific notes and specialist articles from 16 natural scientists who had dealt with primary calcium orthophosphate and its industrial use as a fertilizer. The articles were also provided with full biographies and detailed explanations. In 1927 and 1928 Speter dealt with the electrostatic charges that occur in plastics due to friction. He published several articles in the journals Kunststoffe , Nitrocellulose und Plastische Massen about the electrostatic behavior of silk , plastics and textiles such as Celanese, gun cotton , ethyl cellulose, acetyl cellulose, and benzyl cellulose. To easily check the electrostatics of plastics, Speter designed an electrometer . In 1933 he published some of his experiments in this area in the Kölnische Zeitung .

Speter studied the history of sugar production and processing for several years. In 1932 he described the experiments of Francis Bacon, Otto von Guericke and CW Joch on the triboluminescence of sugar. In 1936 he reported on the medicinal use of sugar in the Middle Ages. He also showed that Liebig and one of his colleagues produced sugar from seven different types of maple in 1834 and how they recommended planting these types of maple extensively in order to make Germany's sugar production self-sufficient. At the same time, however, Speter showed that processing sugar beet brings greater benefits by describing AS Marggrav's research on the extraction of sugar from sugar beet. In 1938 Speter published in the Centralblatt für die Zuckerindustrie an illustrated account of Franz Carl Achard's experiments on extracting sugar from the beet, as well as a detailed bibliography of more than 200 articles by Achard in Die Deutsche Zuckerindustrie .

Another area of ​​interest Speter was explosives. In the Deutsche Zündwaren-Zeitung he described Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädts chemical tinder boxes , which came to Germany from France before 1816. He published the detonation experiments of Fourcroy and Vauquelin with potassium chlorate in regular articles in the journal for the entire gunnery and explosives industry ; explained some of the explosions described in nineteenth-century articles, discussed the history of gas as a warfare agent, and described the manufacture and careful packaging for transporting John Walker's matches. In the same magazine in 1936 he published an illustrated translation from Hungarian on “The history of matches up to the end of the nineteenth century” by Professor Ladislaus von Szathmáry.

Max Speter's collaboration with the company for equipment construction von Bender and Hobein in Munich aroused in him a lifelong interest in scientific equipment and its history. In 1908 he published his first article in the Chemiker-Zeitung about the history of the "Liebig" capacitor. In an illustrated article about Lavoisier's use of scales and weights, he debunked the claim that Lavoisier was the first to use them in chemical experiments. He showed that Stephen Hales , Joseph Black , Andreas Sigismund Marggraf , Pierre-Joseph Macquer and Henry Cavendish used scales and weights in their experiments before Lavoisier.

For several years, Speter was a consultant and employee of the Draeger-Hefte and other publications of the Dräger-Werke in Lübeck, which manufactured pul motors , respirators and other emergency equipment. In his contributions he traced the historical development of ventilators and described the respirators of various researchers and manufacturers. His articles about Jan Ingen-Housz's improved ventilator and about Payerne's experiments and patents on air purification in stuffy environments were presented at the fourth International Life-Saving Congress in June 1934 and then published in at least four editions.

Works

  • Lavoisier and his predecessors. A historical-critical study. Published by Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart 1911.
  • The basic chemical substances. Reclam, Leipzig 1911, 2nd edition 1914.
  • The chemical relationship and its relationship to the other forms of energy. Reclam, Leipzig 1913.
  • Jan Ingen-Housz '"improved" oxygen inhalation device (1783–1784) and its design by Paskal Joseph Ferro (1783/84). Payerne's experiments and patents (1842/43) on the compensation of breathing air in hermetically or otherwise breathing-impaired rooms. Drägerwerk, Lübeck 1934, published in Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen des Drägerwerk. Issue No. 5, Lübeck 1934.
  • Bio, biblio and psychographics by and about Hermann Kopp (1817–1892). In: Osiris , Volume 5, 1938, pp. 392-460.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Max Speter  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Max Speter: Sugar at Ortulff von Bayrlandt Anno 1477. In: Die deutsche Zuckerindustrie 61, 1936, p. 39 f.
personal data
SURNAME Speter, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist and historian of chemistry
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Bistritz
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1942
Place of death Berlin