Rudolph Messel
Rudolph Messel (born January 14, 1848 in Darmstadt , † April 18, 1920 in London ) was a German-British chemical industrialist who worked in England.
Messel, the son of the banker Simon Messel, studied chemistry in Zurich, Heidelberg and Tübingen and received his doctorate in Tübingen . He came to Manchester in 1870, where he was assistant to Frederick Grace Calvert (1819–1873) and Henry Roscoe . In the Franco-Prussian War he returned briefly to Germany in 1870 and served as a medic, where he was wounded. Back in England he became assistant to William Stevens Squire (1834-1906) in his company Dunn, Squire and Co. and soon afterwards in the company Squire, Chapman and Co. He invented a process there, sulfur trioxide for fuming sulfuric acid (oleum) in on an industrial scale, which Squires patented in 1875. Sulfuric acid vapors were passed over finely divided platinum at high temperatures. The end product was used, among other things, for the production of dyes such as alizarin , and Messel's invention established a new branch of the chemical industry worldwide. Messel's contact process was complicated, and in 1886 Clemens Alexander Winkler suggested an improvement using asbestos mixed with platinum.
In 1878 he took over from Squires as Managing Director in the company, which was soon called Spencer, Chapman and Messel and was based in Silvertown (London) . In 1915 he retired from the company for health reasons and moved to London.
In 1907 he became a British citizen. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1912). He was a founding member and twice President of the Society of Chemical Industry , to which he also bequeathed generous grants.
literature
- Ann K. Newmark: Messel, Rudolph (1848–1920) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004
Web links
- Obituary in Nature, Volume 105, 1920, pp. 270-271
- Biography at SCI
- Grace's Guide to British Industrial History
Individual evidence
- ↑ Platinum was used as a catalyst as early as 1831 by Peregrine Phillips in England for the production of sulfuric acid
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Messel, Rudolph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-British chemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 14, 1848 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Darmstadt |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 18, 1920 |
| Place of death | London |