Wilhelm Koenigs

Wilhelm Koenigs

Family tomb of Koenig

Wilhelm Koenigs (born April 22, 1851 in Dülken near Mönchengladbach , † December 15, 1906 in Munich ) was a German chemist and professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

Koenigs was the son of the entrepreneur Franz Wilhelm Koenigs (May 8, 1819 - 1882) and studied from 1868 at the Gewerbeakademie Berlin and the Bergakademie Berlin . He turned to chemistry and worked in 1871 with Carl Remigius Fresenius and at the University of Bonn , where he received his doctorate in 1875 after having worked in Heidelberg in 1874/1875. After completing his doctorate, he briefly attended the University of Berlin , the Polytechnic in Zurich and, from 1876, at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, where he completed his habilitation in 1881 and was appointed associate professor in 1892 .

He mainly dealt with quinoline alkaloids and quinuclidine derivatives and their structure elucidation (the well-known quinine consists of quinoline and quinuclidine). In 1879 he synthesized quinoline from N -allylaniline and thus clarified the structure of quinoline. The Koenigs-Knorr method is named after him and his colleague Eduard Knorr (1867–1926) .

In 1900 Koenigs was elected a member of the Leopoldina . He died in 1906 at the age of 55 and was buried in the family crypt in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (MA, between lit. P + Q). His older brothers were the bankers Felix Koenigs and Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Koenigs .

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists . In: Lexicon of important chemists . Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-8171-1055-3 .
• Wilhelm Koenigs. In: Reports of the German Chemical Society , 45th year 1912, p. 3781. ( doi : 10.1002 / cber.191204503143 )

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Koenigs  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Member entry of Wilhelm Koenigs at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on September 27, 2017.