Rudolf Ruer

Rudolf Ruer in Göttingen

Rudolf Ruer (born September 30, 1865 in Ramsbeck / Westphalia, † August 1, 1938 in Aachen ) was a German chemist .

Live and act

The son of the doctor Hermann Ruer first studied chemistry at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster from 1883 and then switched to the Wiesbaden Fresenius Institute after a short interim semester at the Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg . Finally, he moved in 1885 to the University of Strasbourg , where he in 1889 when Rudolph Fittig Dr. phil. received his doctorate.

After a short military service, Ruer moved to the Technical University of Berlin in 1891 to research the refining of saltpeter and camphor and in 1902 to take his preliminary examination to become a food chemist . He then went to the Georg-August University in Göttingen , where he was taken on by Gustav Tammann as an assistant for the field of inorganic and physical chemistry . Here he also completed his habilitation in 1905 and was taken on as a private lecturer. In 1909, Ruer was offered a position at RWTH Aachen University, where he was initially appointed assistant to Fritz Wüst and a little later as professor for theoretical metallurgy and physical chemistry at the Faculty of Metallurgy and Materials Management.

Ruer's main interest lay among other things in the metallography of iron , copper and zinc , about which he also wrote a fundamental and recognized textbook. In the years 1924 to 1926 he sparked a fierce research controversy by correcting the electrochemically determined atomic mass of copper from 63.57 through his measurements to 63.546, which is still valid today.

However, in the spring of 1933, denunciation measures by the student body also began at RWTH Aachen University . The ASTA ( General Student Committee ) and the student leaders sent the denunciation committee specially set up for this purpose, consisting of Hermann Bonin , Hubert Hoff , Felix Rötscher , Adolf Wallichs , and Robert Hans Wentzel, about which of the lecturers and professors were not of Aryan descent and supposedly or actually had an undesirable political attitude. According to the law for the restoration of the civil service due to his Jewish origin, Ruer was supposed to work with Professors Otto Blumenthal , Walter Maximilian Fuchs , Arthur Guttmann , Ludwig Hopf , Theodore von Kármán , Paul Ernst Levy , Karl Walter Mautner Alfred Meusel , Leopold Karl Pick , Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss ' teaching permits are withdrawn. In spite of a possible exception rule for those university members who were civil servants before 1914, Ruer was initially taken on leave, but due to his age-related retirement in September 1933, he was released from all other official duties and thus spared from a politically justified official dismissal. Ruer died on August 1, 1938 in Aachen and his wife left Germany after his funeral.

His younger brother Otto Ruer was Lord Mayor of Bochum from 1925 to 1933 .

Works (selection)

• Behavior of cinnamic acid and ethyl crotonic acid during oxidation with super-manganese acid potash , 1889.
• Metallography in elementary representation Hamburg [u. a.]: Voss, 1907.

literature

• Manfred Zeidler: 100 years of physical chemistry in Aachen in Bunsenmagazin 4/2006
• Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933–1945) . Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 , ( Aachen Studies on Technology and Society 4), (At the same time: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2003).

Web links

• Biography article on Ruer from RWTH Aachen University