Victor von Richter

Obituary 1891

Victor von Richter (born April 15, 1841 in Dobele , Latvia, † October 8, 1891 in Breslau ) was a German chemist .

Life

He was the son of the preacher Julius Wilhelm Theophil von Richter (1808 - 1892), who first had a congregation in Doblen (Dobele) in Courland and then the Jesus congregation in St. Petersburg, attended the St. Annenschule in St. Petersburg and first studied physics and then chemistry at the University of Dorpat . After receiving his doctorate (candidate title) in 1863 (dissertation: On organic acids with three oxygen atoms ), he moved to the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg as an assistant for chemistry , where he obtained his master's degree in 1867. From 1871 he taught analytical chemistry there. In 1872 he was at the University of St. Petersburg Dr. chem. habilitation (Russian doctorate). In 1872 he became professor of general and analytical chemistry at the Agronomic Institute in Pulawy (Nowo Alexandria). He turned down a call to Kazan . In 1872 he went on a trip abroad to complete the collections of the institute and to get to know foreign agricultural institutes and in 1873 he was at the world exhibition in Vienna and at the fourth congress of Russian naturalists in Kazan. In 1874 he had to give up his professorship due to a tuberculosis illness and traveled to areas with a milder climate (France, Italy, Turkey) to recover. He was in Bonn for a long time, where he returned to chemistry. In 1875 he became a private lecturer at the University of Breslau with the inaugural lecture on the periodic system of the elements and the newly discovered element gallium (the other post-doctoral work was waived). In 1879 he became an associate professor of chemistry there. The chair holder Carl Löwig was well over seventy by then and had lost interest in lecturing and the associated adjustment to the current state of science. At first he only gave up the leadership of the laboratory for organic chemistry to von Richter and had him give lectures on technical chemistry. He remained in this difficult, subordinate position until Löwig's death in 1890. He was unable to pursue any further suggestions that he received during a long stay at the Chemical Institute in Munich in 1882/83. In addition, there was the renewed outbreak of his illness, which regularly forced him to take longer spa stays in Görbersdorf in Silesia. In 1890 he was appointed director of the Agricultural Technological Institute as the successor to Friedlaender, which was raised to an independent institute. He died of tuberculosis. Before that, he made a long trip to St. Petersburg, where he visited his father, who had now become a bishop, London, where he attended a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he was a member, and Germany, where he was Visited chemical factories.

In 1887 he married the widowed Frau Vogel von Falkenstein (she was also seriously ill with tuberculosis and died in 1891).

plant

In the field of organic chemistry, v. Richter with reactions of benzoid ( aromatic ) compounds (he essentially consolidated August von Kekulé's theory of aromatics and treated, for example, bromine derivatives of benzene). In doing so, he discovered the Von Richter reaction, which was later named after him, and a heterocycle synthesis ( "cinnoline ring closure according to von Richter) ".

He also emerged as a textbook writer that was widely used in Russia, Germany, Italy and the United States (there was also a Dutch translation). His textbook on inorganic chemistry was first published in German in Bonn in 1875. He systematically used the periodic table of Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer and thus contributed to its dissemination. In the second edition in 1878 (with a section on crystallography) and a third in 1881 (with a section on thermochemistry). Three more editions followed by 1889, and Richter himself translated the book into Russian (six editions from 1874 to 1887). He endeavored to present connections and not just to publish a technical compendium or a collection of recipes and clearly separated hypotheses and abstractions from certain facts. The first edition of his textbook on organic chemistry followed in 1876. As early as 1869, Richter published in the reports of the German Chemical Society, particularly on developments in Russia.

Fonts

• Chemistry of carbon compounds . Cohen, Bonn, 1st edition 1876, 7th edition / revised. by R. Anschütz 1894 Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
• V. v. Richter's textbook of inorganic chemistry: with 90 woodcuts a. 1 Spectral sheet . Cohen, Bonn, 1st edition 1875, 8th edition / revised. by H. Klinger 1895 Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
• Victor von Richter´s Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry, Philadelphia, Blakiston´s Sons 1900 (Translator Edgar F. Smith )
• Victor Von Richter's Organic Chemistry; Or, Chemistry of the Carbon Compounds, Philadelphia, Blakiston's Sons 1900
  • Edition in four volumes, 3rd edition, Elsevier, New York 1938 to 1947
• Traité de chimie organique . Paris 1918 Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf

In 1866 his textbook on titration appeared in Russian .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the collaboration of Heinz Cassebaum: Lexicon of important chemists . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1988, pp. 362-363, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .
2. ↑ V. v. Richter, reports of the German Chemical Society , 16, 677 (1883).
3. ↑ Helmut Krauch and Werner Kunz: Reactions of Organic Chemistry , 5th edition, edited by W. Kunz and Eberhard Nonnenmacher, Hüthig, Heidelberg, 1976.