Museum of Göttingen Chemistry

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Chemical laboratory, Göttingen, around 1890

The Museum of Göttingen Chemistry preserves and promotes the memory of over 250 years of chemistry at the University of Göttingen .

The museum was founded in 1979 on the initiative of Oskar Glemser , the longtime director of the Inorganic Chemical Institute. The museum, located at the Faculty of Chemistry in Göttingen-Weende , is supported by a sponsoring association of the Göttingen Chemical Society - Museum of Chemistry e. V. (1st chairman Herbert W. Roesky ) supported.

The museum is involved in the awarding of the Liebig Wöhler Friendship Prize donated by Wilhelm Lewicki to promote research in the history of chemistry .

Exhibits

The basis of the museum is a collection of historical precision mechanical and optical devices, e.g. B. Analytical balances , polarimeters , refractometers , for example one from Carl Zeiss 1895. The instruments date from around 1900 from the old chemical laboratory on Hospitalstrasse, which was demolished in 1977. The collection includes several hundred historical objects, photographs, books and documents on the history of chemistry, especially in Göttingen.

The museum contains exhibits from numerous personalities who worked in Göttingen. The earliest representative to be mentioned is Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben , who wrote the beginnings of chemistry in 1775 . From 1778 Johann Friedrich Gmelin held a professorship for chemistry in Göttingen, Christoph Girtanner was a private scholar there. A native of Göttingen Friedrich Strohmeyer took over the chair until his death in 1835. This was followed by Robert Bunsen and finally the pioneer of organic chemistry Friedrich Wohler , who is represented by diverse documents in the museum. His student and later assistant Friedrich Konrad Beilstein became an associate professor in Göttingen in 1865. Hans Hübner spent his entire professional life at the General Chemical Laboratory, right up to the directorate. There are also exhibits by Julia Lermontowa , the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry (1874). Furthermore Rudolf Leuckart and the Nobel Prize winner Otto Wallach , fathers of the Leuckart-Wallach reaction . Another Nobel Prize winner in chemistry represented here was Walther Nernst . In 1903 the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry was founded, represented in the museum by Gustav Tammann and Richard Zsigmondy , for example . Adolf Windaus worked in Göttingen for almost 30 years, as did Arnold Eucken , one of whose last doctoral students the later Nobel Prize winner Manfred Eigen was. The exhibits go through the physical chemist Wilhelm Jost to Ulrich Schöllkopf , from 1968 director at the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Göttingen.

The oldest and most beautiful objects include, for example, chemistry textbooks from the 18th century, some of which are still in Latin, the doctoral certificate from Friedrich Wöhler , a precision balance from the workshop of Moritz Meyerstein , who also built instruments for Carl Friedrich Gauß , among others . There are also chemical preparations from Otto Wallach's laboratory and early analytical balances from Lorenz Sartorius' factory.

literature

  • Günter Beer and Herbert W. Roesky: Museum of Göttingen Chemistry. In: “Completely designed for studying.” The museums, collections and gardens of the University of Göttingen. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3892444528 , pp. 201-205.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Flyer of the museum (2016) , accessed on May 10, 2017

Coordinates: 51 ° 33 ′ 30 "  N , 9 ° 56 ′ 58.3"  E