Paul Walden

This article covers the Latvian-German chemist. For the British musician of the same name, see Guru Josh .

Paul Walden

Monument to Paul Walden in Riga The mirror image of the malic acid molecule based on the idea of Jānis Stradiņš designed by Andris Vārpa, 2003

Paul Walden , and Paul Walden , ( Latvian Pauls Valdens , Russian Павел Иванович Вальден / Pavel Ivanovich Walden ; * July 14 ^{. Jul} / 26. July  1863 ^greg. In Rose Beck in Wenden , Governorate of Livonia , Russian Empire , † January 22 1957 in Gammertingen , Federal Republic of Germany ) was a Russian-Latvian-German chemist and science historian .

Life

Paul Walden was born the thirteenth child of the Latvian farming family of Jānis and Anna Valdens. When he was four years old, his father died; at the age of ten his mother handed him over to the care of the teacher Erdmanis Rubens. Walden attended schools in Cēsis and Riga. After graduating from high school, he studied chemistry at the Riga Polytechnic with a degree in engineering in 1889 (although he was a student of Wilhelm Ostwald in Riga ), and continued his studies in physics and chemistry in Leipzig and Munich. In Leipzig he heard from Ostwald with Johannes Wislicenus and Gustav Wiedemann and in Munich in 1893 he was with Adolf von Baeyer . In 1891 he was in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald summa cum laude to the Dr. phil. PhD (Dissertation: About the affinity sizes of some organic acids and their relationship to the constitution of the same ). In the following years he regularly visited Ostwald in Leipzig, whose preferred candidate for a professorship he was later to be, and made contacts with important chemists. In Odessa in 1893 he passed his master's degree in chemistry (dissertation: On semipermeable membranes and osmotic phenomena on the same ) and in the same year became professor of analytical and physical chemistry at the Riga Polytechnic. On June 28, 1898, he married Wanda Wilhelmine Aline von Lutzau (1878–1950) in Wolmar-Weidenhof . In 1899 he also received his doctorate from the University of Petersburg (Russian doctorate, corresponding to a habilitation and a prerequisite for an academic career in Russia) with the work materials on stereochemistry . From 1901 to 1906 he was rector of the Riga Polytechnic. During this time he was also involved in setting up the chemical department at the newly founded Technical University of Wroclaw and, at the invitation of the Russian government, with Dmitri Mendeleev and Nikolai Alexandrowitsch Mensutkin at a newly founded technical teaching academy in St. Petersburg. He was offered the chairs of Menshutkin and Mendeleev in Saint Petersburg, among others, but stayed in Riga. In 1907 he was appointed to the Imperial Russian Real Council of State with the title of Excellency , which was associated with a hereditary title of nobility. In 1910 he succeeded Friedrich Konrad Beilstein as a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and in the same year became head of the chemical laboratory of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Since 1927 he was an honorary foreign member of this academy. In 1912, Walden in New York was given the task of organizing the next International Congress of Applied Chemistry, which was to take place in Saint Petersburg in 1915. During the First World War, the Riga University of Applied Sciences was evacuated to Moscow and Walden succeeded her as rector. After the end of the First World War , Walden turned down a new professorship in Riga due to the uncertain situation in Latvia and fled to Germany with the last German troops in 1919. He was first placed in a camp in Remplin Castle near Malchin. In 1916 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

In 1919 he became professor for inorganic chemistry at the University of Rostock , where he retired in 1934. In 1932 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . After his retirement he turned to the history of chemistry. In 1936 he became chairman of the section on the history of chemistry at the Association of German Chemists . In 1934 he became a member of the NSDAP and the NS teachers' association. He was a supporting member of the SS.

During the Second World War , after a bomb attack in April 1942, Walden lost his house in Rostock, the library with around 10,000 volumes and belongings. The eighty-year-old moved to Frankfurt am Main and was bombed there too. After the end of the war he accepted a visiting professor for the history of chemistry in Tübingen in 1945 in order to provide for a living, since his Rostock pension was not paid.

Scientific achievements

Walden worked in a broad field of research in organic, inorganic and physical chemistry. Among other things, he dealt with stereochemistry and electrochemistry in non-aqueous solvents.

Walden was able to prove synthetically that the direction of rotation in polarized light changes by exchanging the substituents on the chiral carbon atom. He was able to produce both L -malic acid and D -malic acid from bromosuccinic acid. With this substitution, the substituent introduced takes a different place on the chiral carbon than the leaving substituent. In 1897 Walden was able to show that the conversion does not result in a racemic mixture of substances from a mixture of L -malic acid and D -malic acid, but that the chirality of the carbon atom is reversed. In 1906, Emil Fischer described this reaction with a change in carbon chirality as Walden's reversal .

From 1899 to 1901, Walden investigated the conductivity of thionyl chloride , sulfuryl chloride , dimethyl sulfate and phosphorus trichloride and used these to investigate the ionic structure of triphenylmethyl chloride or the triphenylmethyl radical, iodine and other substances. The dissociating force was attributed to the dielectric constant of the solvent.

Walden found that the product of the equivalent conductivity and viscosity of electrolytic solutions at a given temperature is often a constant, regardless of the solvent. This law is known as Walden's rule or Walden's viscosity rule . The rule of Ostwald and Walden (also named after Georg Bredig ) from 1887 gives a relationship between the ionic valency and the conductivity.

Walden wrote the book History of Organic Chemistry since 1880 , it was the historical continuation of the work of Carl Graebe .

Fonts

• Ломоносовъ какъ химикъ. St. Petersburg 1911. ( Lomonossow as a chemist)
• Editor with Carl Adam Bischoff : Handbuch der Stereochemie . H. Bechhold, Frankfurt a. M. 1894, Archives
• Electrochemistry of non-aqueous solutions, Leipzig: Barth 1924
• Molecular sizes of electrolytes in non-aqueous solvents, Dresden: Steinkopf 1923
• Очерк истории химии в России, в кн .: Ладенбург А., "Лекции по истории развития химии от Лавенбург от Лавенбург. с нем., Од., 1917 (overview of the history of chemistry in Russia, in: A. Ladenburg, lectures on the history of chemistry from Lavoisier to today)
• Теории растворов в их исторической последовательности, П., 1921 (theory of solutions in historical sequence)
• Measure, number and weight in the chemistry of the past. A chapter from the prehistory of the so-called quantitative age of chemistry. Stuttgart 1931 (= collection of chemical and chemical-technical lectures, new series, 8)
• Goethe as a chemist and technician, Berlin: Verlag Chemie 1932
• History of Organic Chemistry since 1880, Julius Springer Verlag 1941, Reprint 1972 (History of Organic Chemistry, Volume 2)
• Three millennia of chemistry, Berlin: Limpert 1944
• History of Chemistry, Bonn: Athenäum Verlag, 2nd edition 1950
• Chronological overview tables on the history of chemistry from the oldest times to the present, Springer, Berlin / Göttingen / Heidelberg 1952
• Paths and hostels. Mein Leben, Wiesbaden, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974 1998 (editor G. Kersten)

Honors

Latvian special stamp (2013)

On the occasion of his 150th birthday, the Latvian Post issued a special stamp in honor of Walden in 2013 (value: 100 santīmu = 1 lats or LVL = 1.42 €; the euro was introduced in Latvia in 2014).

In 1943 he became an honorary member of the Leopoldina.

literature

• Paul Walden: From the memories of an old chemical contemporary , Natural Sciences, Heft 4, 1950, pp. 73–81
• Georg Lockemann: Paul von Walden, the Nestor of Chemistry, on his 90th birthday on July 26, 1953 , Naturwissenschaften, Issue 14, pp. 373–374
• On the 80th birthday of Prof. Dr. Dr. Paul Walden, Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung, Volume 58, 1943, p. 270
• Dietrich von Engelhardt : Scientific relations between Germany and Russia in the autobiography “Ways and Hostels. My life ”by the chemist Paul Walden (1863–1957), in: A. Schürmann, B. Weiss (ed.): Chemistry - Culture - History. Festschrift for Hans-Werner Schütt on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Berlin: GNT-Verlag; 2002, pp. 129-145
• Markus Vonderau, Deutsche Chemie, Dissertation Marburg 1994, p. 172

Web links

Commons : Paul Walden  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Paul Walden in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Paul Walden in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
• Biographical note from the University of Rostock

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jānis Stradiņš: Pauls Valdens - latviešu nācijas pazaudētais un Ķīmijas gadā jaunatrastais dēls. (September 26, 2011, in Latvian, accessed October 21, 2012)
2. ↑ see: Wanda Walden's death register entry at the StA Gammertingen No. 12/1950.
3. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Pawel (Paul) Iwanowitsch Walden. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 9, 2015 (in Russian). 
4. ^ List of former members since 1666: Letter W. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 13, 2020 (French). 
5. ↑ Helmut Maier, chemist in the “Third Reich”, Wiley-VCH, 2015, p. 329f
6. ↑ Helmut Maier, Chemiker im Third Reich, p. 329, short biography in footnote. According to Maier, he was a leading figure in national chemical historiography.