Wilhelm Connstein

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Wilhelm Connstein (born April 27, 1870 in Berlin , † after 1934) was a German chemist and doctor .

Live and act

During his studies, Connstein became a member of the Saravia Berlin fraternity in 1888 . He received his doctorate in medicine and dealt with fat absorption in the digestive tract in Berlin in the 1890s and thus attracted some attention.

In 1897 he joined the company of Benno Jaffé and Ludwig Darmstaedter in Berlin-Charlottenburg, which sold wool wax under the name Lanolin and produced cosmetics. Here he dealt with fermentative fat splitting. In 1900 the company became a joint stock company as the Vereinigte Chemische Werke.

He became known when he and the chemist Karl Lüdecke found an industrial method for producing glycerine, based on the work of Carl Neuberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Experimental Therapy in Berlin (1911). It consisted of stopping the alcoholic fermentation of sugar by yeast by adding sodium sulfite at a stage where glycerin was formed as an intermediate. They found the process as early as 1914, applied for a patent in 1915, but had to keep the process secret until after the First World War. The glycerine was used, among other things, to produce TNT. During the First World War they produced around 1000 tons of glycerine per month, but after the war it was not competitive with production as a by-product of soap production or from the hydrolysis of fats and oils. During the First World War, it had a similar significance on the German side as the acetone-butanol process by Chaim Weizmann on the Allied side. In 1919 Lüdecke and Connstein published their method and in 1919 they received the Adolf von Baeyer memorial coin , one of the highest awards from the Association of German Chemists , a predecessor organization of the Society of German Chemists . In 1922 he was a board member of the United Chemical Works.

In 1934 he received a patent for the removal of naphthalene from luminous gas .

Fonts

  • with Michaelis: About the change of the chyle fats in the blood, 2 parts, meeting reports Akademie Wiss. Berlin, 1897, p. 771, Pflügers Archive, Volume 65, 1897, p. 473
  • with Michaelis: Further communications on the lipolytic function of the blood, Pflüger's archive, volume 69, 1897, p. 76
  • On the absorption and assimilation of fats, Medical Week, Volume 23, 1900
  • with Hoyer, Wartenberg: About fermentative fat splitting, reports of the German Chemical Society, November 10, 1902, p. 3988
  • About fermentative lipid splitting, Results of Physiology, Volume 3, 1904, pp. 194-232.
  • with Karl Lüdecke: Glycerine production from sugar, Die Naturwissenschaften, Volume 7, 1919, pp. 403–405.

literature

  • James A. Barnett, Linda Barnett: Yeast Research, a historical overview, ASM Press 2011, pp. 88-90.
  • Hinderk Conrads, Brigitte Lohff: Carl Neuberg - Biochemistry, Politics and History, Franz Steiner 2006, p. 73

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Register Office Berlin III: marriage register . No. 361/1898.
  2. ↑ Willy Nolte (Ed.): Burschenschafter Stammrolle. Directory of the members of the German Burschenschaft according to the status of the summer semester 1934. Berlin 1934, p. 74.
  3. ↑ Chemiker-Zeitung, Volume 46, 1922, on the 25th anniversary of Connstein's service
personal data
SURNAME Connstein, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH after 1934