Wilhelm Prandtl

Wilhelm Antonin Alexander Prandtl (born March 22, 1878 in Hamburg , † October 22, 1956 in Munich ) was a German chemist and chemical historian.

Life

Prandtl was the son of the brewery owner Antonin Prandtl the Elder. J. (1842–1909) (see Alexander Prandtl ) and from 1897 studied chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with a doctorate in 1901 (on some new components of euxenite) under Karl Andreas Hofmann . He then spent two years at the Austrian Association for Chemical and Metallurgical Products in Aussig and was assistant to Albert Hilger and then to Theodor Paul at the Institute for Pharmacy and Laboratory for Applied Chemistry at the University of Munich from 1903 to 1910 . In 1906 he completed his habilitation under Adolf von Baeyer ( compounds of higher orders between the oxides RO2 and R2O5. A contribution to the systematics of inorganic compounds ), he became a private lecturer at the University of Munich and in 1910 he became an associate professor for inorganic chemistry and (unpaid) department head at the chemical laboratory of Bavarian Academy of Sciences (as successor to Hofmann). In 1917/18 he was assigned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin, where research into poison gases was carried out under Fritz Haber .

In 1935 he was supposed to become a full professor at Heinrich Wieland's request , but this was rejected because of his wife's Jewish descent. In 1937 he was forcibly retired for the same reasons.

No longer having a laboratory, he turned to the history of chemistry. After the war in 1946 he was able to achieve his reinstatement as a professor in Munich ( planned associate professor with the position of full professor ). He also chaired the university's history of science seminar as the successor to the late Kurt Vogel . In 1956 he committed suicide.

He was the cousin of Ludwig Prandtl .

plant

As a chemist, he initially dealt with complex compounds, especially vanadium , with poison gases - he synthesized trichloronitromethane and phosgene - oxime for the first time - and with polyacids and dealt with rare earths from 1911 until his forced retirement in 1937 . He improved the process for separating them so that they could be displayed in high purity, so that his preparations were used for precise atomic mass determinations (by Otto Hönigschmid ) and for spectral investigations (A. Gatterer at the Vatican observatory).

As a chemical historian, he published a book about German chemists at the beginning of the 18th century, dealing with Johann Nepomuk von Fuchs , Franz von Kobell , Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner , Justus Liebig , Friedrich Wöhler , Christian Friedrich Schönbein , Eilhard Mitscherlich , Heinrich Rose and Gustav Magnus , a double biography of two of the most important chemists of the 19th century, Humphry Davy and Jöns Jacob Berzelius, and a history of the chemistry laboratory of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (later the Chemical Institute of the University of Munich). He also wrote a book about the milk centrifuge developed by his father Antonin and further developed by his uncle Alexander Prandtl .

Benno Bleyer , Wilhelm Franke and Günther Endres are among his doctoral students .

Fonts

• with Julius Fessler, Hubert Gebele: Gas warfare agents and gas poisoning: How do we protect ourselves? , Munich: Gmelin 1931, 4th edition 1937
• Representation of the rare earths, journal for inorganic and general chemistry, Volume 238, 1938, pp. 321–334
• Antonin Prandtl and the invention of skimming milk by centrifugation , Munich 1938
• Die Literatur des Vanadins 1804-1905 , Hamburg: Voss 1906
• Humphry Davy, Jöns Jacob Berzelius: Two leading chemists from the 1st half of the 19th century , Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlags-Gesellschaft 1948
• Wavelengths of spectra in Angstrom and E units , Munich: Oldenbourg 1951
• The history of the chemical laboratory of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich , Weinheim 1952.
• German chemists in the first half of the 19th century: Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, Franz von Kobell, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, Justus Liebig, Friedrich Wöhler, Christian Friedrich Schönbein, Eilhard Mitscherlich, Heinrich Rose, Gustav Magnus , Weinheim: VCH 1956

He also wrote chapters for Gmelin's Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry.

literature

• Winfried Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Prandtl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography at the University of Hamburg
• Freddy Litten biography