Paul Ludwig Christoph Gmelin

Paul Ludwig Christoph Gmelin (born October 8, 1885 in Pinache ; † September 23, 1967 in Mannheim ) was a German physicist who was also known as Paul Ludwig Christian Gmelin.

Gmelin came from a well-known Swabian family of scholars. His father was the pastor Ludwig Eugen Gmelin (1851-1929) and his grandfather the pharmacist and chemist Paul Albrecht Ferdinand Gmelin . Among other things, he went to the Latin school in Göppingen and the Reallyzeum in Böblingen . After graduating from Dillmann-Realgymnasium in Stuttgart, he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the TH Stuttgart and the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen from 1904 . One of his teachers was the mathematician Alexander Brill in Tübingen. Even as a teenager he had a tendency to do handicrafts and from 1906 turned to experimental physics. From 1907 he was assistant to Friedrich Paschen in Tübingen, where he received his doctorate magna cum laude in 1908 (The Zeeman effect of some mercury lines in weak magnetic fields. Absolutely measured) . Then he passed his teaching degree before he went back to Paschen, who made him second assistant. In 1910 he went - mainly for financial reasons - as a physicist to BASF in Ludwigshafen in their main laboratory and from 1914 headed the physical laboratory in their plant in Ludwigshafen-Oppau and was head of the operational control. In the same year he moved to Mannheim . He stayed with BASF until his retirement in 1947.

In Tübingen under Paschen he worked with Richard Gans on the precision measurement of magnetic fields. Gans was Paschen's first assistant and associate professor at the time. At BASF, he dealt with measurement technology for chemistry, at the beginning under Jonathan Zenneck with the development of furnaces and measuring devices for nitrogen production using an electric arc process similar to the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was soon discontinued because the process was too energy-intensive and the Haber-Bosch process proved to be superior, in whose industrial development Gmelin contributed under Carl Bosch . Physicists at BASF were initially viewed with suspicion as outsiders by chemists, but then found a role in the development of measurement technology. Gmelin also gained fame for a method of determining the composition of gas mixtures using only acoustic methods of density measurement. He also developed safety technology (warning devices for carbon monoxide concentration and others) and operational control, an area for which he was one of the founding fathers. His department at the Oppau plant grew to around 400 employees in 1930.

In 1930 he lectured at the general meeting of the Association of German Chemists (physical technology in inorganic chemical technology) and in 1937 at the 13th German Physics Conference (physical measurement methods in chemical companies) .

In 1914 he married Elisabeth Seuffer (1893–1972), with whom he had a son, the chief medical officer Wolfgang Gmelin (1918–1989) and a daughter, the music teacher Waltraut Reichle (1915–1991). Gmelin, like his father and mother, was musically gifted.

Web links

• Biography of Alexander Kipnis