A Synthetic Environment

Angewandte's songbook

2008-01-29T12:36:00.000+01:00

Out here I spoke about attempted humor in graphical abstracts of Angewandte. The abstract often begins with a few words aiming to create some hilarity.

I have no idea whether Jerry Lee Lewis could laugh about it (or Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer).

It seems to be a hype to use song titles (or derivatives) for this. Many other songs can be identified.

Chubby Checker:
Let's twist again
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704465)

The Beatles of course:
You say you want a resolution
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704021)

All together now
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703877)

Queen:
Who wants to live forever?
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704137)

Culture Club:
Chemical chameleon
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704520)

Pete Seeger (and of course The Byrds):
Turn, turn, turn
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704602)
Yeah I know it's from Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1–8.

Wilbert Harrison (or Brian Ferry or Bob Dylan)
Let's stick together
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704654)

Maybe in the future musicians will be rated according to the amount of songs that have been used by Angewandte. The Beatles are number 1 right now.

Champagne chemistry

2007-12-20T15:39:00.001+01:00

The previous post about was about Wine Chemistry. One discipline in this area is Champagne Chemistry

A while ago Industrial and Engineering Chemistry published a wine special (Vol. 27, No. 11: November 1935).

One article fits very well in those days around Christmas and new year.

Manufacture of Champagne and Sparkling Burgundy
F. M. Champlin, H. E. Goresline, D. K. Tressler
Ind. Eng. Chem.; 1935; 27(11); 1240-1243.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie50311a003

It is a nice article to read and it has some bad quality but nice pictures.

Here is another nice article for Christmas time: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/fam.810180103

Enjoy... Happy X-mas and a happy etc. etc. etc.

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine

2007-12-18T12:38:00.000+01:00

Do you like wine?

An alarming title of a paper by Harry Drake Gibbs (1872 – 1934). This is the guy from gibbs reagent (2,6-dichloroquinonechloroimide for a phenol test, Chem. Rev. 1927, 3, 291)
The arsenic in the wine came from arsenic-containing pesticides, clarifying agents, aniline-dyes and agents to clean the wine casks.

You may think: ‘I don’t care I prefer beer.’ Well don’t feel safe.

The Manchester 1900 arsenic brewage resulted in 6000 poisonings and 70 deaths. The arsenic came from glucose, so the beer did not comply with the Reinheitsgebot.

Invert sugar (hydrolyzed sucrose) can be added while brewing beer to speed up the fermentation. Invert sugar can be made by cooking normal sugar in the presence of an acid (resulting in fructose and glucose). The 1900 brewer used invert suger prepared by by this method using sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid was made from sulfur obtained by combution of sulfur containing ore (pyrite). Unfortunately this ore contained quite some arsenic. The sulfuric acid was polluted with this arsenic and in the end there was the arsenicated beer.

This type of beer is still not very popular, most homebrewers prefer decent stuff.

Arsenicated wine is not rare. It has been said that Napoleon died from arsenic poisoning on Saint Helena in 1821.

If this is true it does not mean that someone poisoned him deliberately. Maybe he just drank the wrong stuff.

Mother's milk chemistry

2007-11-29T15:45:00.000+01:00

There is this very nice paper by Prof. Albert Ripley Leeds (prof of chemistry at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J. who died of gastric cancer in 1902)

He analyzed the ingredients of mother’s milk and relates that to age, nationality, hair color etc.

The style of writing is awesome.

Prof. Albert screwed things up, writes it down and publishes it. That’s something you don’t see a lot nowadays.

Apart from analyses Prof. Albert describes physical properties.

When you study mother’s milk you have to describe this property.

Can you imagine a German brunette giving a chemistry professor (probably with beard) a breast?

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred being nursed by someone else:

Here are some other details of the Polish lady.

Too bad, no exact measurements of her breasts.

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred a younger lady.

This amazing 19th century paper clearly shows how careful they were back then with collecting their data.

Top 5 inappropriate behaviour chemists

2007-11-28T13:44:00.000+01:00

1) Samuel Edwin Ashby
Pharmaceutical chemist Ashby was found guilty by the Statutory Committee of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain for misconduct on 25 October 2006. His name was removed from the register of pharmaceutical chemists. Ashby made a lovely record of inappropriate behaviour at 5 pharmacies. Supplying the wrong medicine to patients, taking oxazepam and other drugs for his own use, calling female colleagues and customers arrogant cows or stupid bitches, telling the manager to shut up and piss off, physically assault staff members with iron bars, using offensive language and ignore the code of ethics.

2) Paracelsus
The alchemist and physician wandered from town to town through Europe in the 16th century. Quarreling with everybody everywhere he came, and carefully preserve his reputation as an arrogant person. He could often be found on the streets showing off with his knowledge while being drunk and wearing the same clothes for several months. His disciple Oporinus wrote that Paracelsus was an irreverent, a glutton, and a drunk.

3) Joyce Gilchrist

Forensic chemist Gilchrist falsified evidence for 15 years in many cases. On the basis of her testimonies several people were sentenced to death and 12 have already been executed. Not very kind of her.

4) Colleen Brubaker

Police chemist Brubaker stole drugs from the Philadelphia Police Department in order to satisfy her addiction. Several drug dealers walked back out on the street because the evidence was gone. It's hard to deny an addiction when such a photograph exists.

5) James Watson
Nobel prize winner and world champion in the art of saying stupid things.

The rise and fall of rimonabant

2007-11-26T11:47:00.000+01:00

The rise and fall of SR141716A/rimonabant/Acomplia/Zimulti

Rise

Fall

Angewandte's graphical abstracts

2007-11-16T15:27:00.000+01:00

It’s always nice to go through the graphical abstracts of Angewandte. A lot of colorful things that try to catch your eye.

A little bit of humor is often present

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703486

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200702200

The latest issue contains a graphical abstract with pictures of a lovely way to recover a catalyst.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703418

Birthday...

2007-11-14T13:35:00.000+01:00

1 year old, 139 posts, 50K+ visitors, top 5 lists, beards and dead chemists....Hooray!

Beard chemistry

2007-10-30T14:20:00.003+01:00

Shulgin is a bearded chemist. It might be wise for him to shave it off. His beard contains evidence for the narcotic brigade. See here:

Occult chemistry is nice but beard chemistry is awesome. It is a privilege to perform such analyses.

Very nice that they explicitly pay attention to hygiene.

Unfortunately they failed to mention the brand of the shaver in the 'Apparatus' section.

Crick to Watson

2007-10-19T09:32:00.000+02:00

Albert has his own 'What they said' about this here.

Nobel beards

2007-10-12T12:40:00.001+02:00

It has been said several times on this blog how important a beard can be for a chemist.

Ψ*Ψ even suggested to include the tag beard on this blog. (Great idea!)

Anyway... The Nobel laureates in the 5 traditional disciplines of 2007 are known. I am quite dissapointed. Let's compare this year to the first Nobel Prize year.

1901

Wilhelm C. Röntgen (Physics), Emil A. von Behring (Physiology or Medicine), Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme (Literature)
Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy (Peace), Jacobus H. van't Hoff (Chemistry)

5 bearded laureates, 1 not bearded

A bummer that the beardless guy is a chemist, but 5 out of 6 is a good score.

2007

Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg (Physics), Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies (Physiology or Medicine)
Doris Lessing (Literature), IPCC and Al Gore (Peace), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry)

No beard at all!

How about the chemistry laureates? How bearded were they in history. (I mean that they must have a beard on the portrait on the official website.)

1901 was not very good but in 1902 there was Emil Fisher to show the world how it should be done.

A beard and a pince-nez!

A great shock when you count the amount of bearded chemistry Nobel laureates over the years.

149 laureates and only 13 were bearded (a lousy 8.7%).

1901-1925 : 9 bearded laureates. In 1995 Mario J. Molina was the first bearded laureate in 70 years.

There were 3 beards after Molina. The last hero was (sure) 'The Man' in 2005. Okay, not an imressive beard, but any visible facial hair on the chin is sufficient.

Let's hope that next year there is a prize for someone like Stoddart or Seeman.

Thomson and Anderson

2007-10-11T14:48:00.000+02:00

Couldn't resist posting this...

I posted that picture of the old lab and a picture of the guy who set up that lab; Prof. Thomas Thomson. The picture was taken around 1864. Thomson died in 1852 and was succeeded by Thomas Anderson.

How about this beard? Quite impressive I'd say.

Old labs

2007-10-05T13:29:00.000+02:00

Old photos of chemistry labs are awesome.

A lot of bottles and men working in suit without safety glasses.

University of California 1888

Crowded labs with wooden benches and no ventilation at all.

Kansas State Agricultural College (1899)

Even labs crowded with women.

1915 Oregon Agricultural College

Or just an old shed with the smell of dung still in it, but a perfect place to discover Radium.

This made me wonder; What is the oldest photo of a chemistry lab? This is the oldest I could find.

Glasgow University ca. 1864

The laboratory was set up by the legendary Thomas Thomson.

In 1811 Thomson set up one of the first chemistry labs in Brittain in Edinburgh. This lab in Glasgow was set up in 1831. This lab seems to be the safest. If you are just sitting there doing nothing, what can go wrong?

Honored by google

2007-09-28T15:47:00.000+02:00

It is very nice that people find us in this way; we feel very honored.

The piano chemist

2007-09-18T16:45:00.000+02:00

So, who is this forgotten musician chemist?

As far as I know he was not able to play an instrument very well and was not singing opera in the evening. It is the man who is the probably only chemist who has a named musical instument.

Behold the Bechstein-Siemens-Nernst grand piano!

This piano was named after these guys

Carl Bechstein (with a moustache growing out of his nose), Werner von Siemens (nice 'only on the cheeks moustache') and the chemist Walther Nernst (with his perpetual pince-nez)

The Bechstein-Siemens-Nernst grand piano (or neo-Bechstein piano) was one of the first electric pianos. Invented by Nernst with the help of the Bechstein company for the piano and the Siemens company for elecrical parts.

The strings vibrate in a magnetic field which produces an electric current in the coil around the magnet.

A radio amplifier is used to produce an electronically modified sound which comes out of the speaker of a connected phonograph. The piano sounded like an electric guitar.

Nernst started to build single string models in the lab.

In 1930 Bechstein introduced the piano on the market and Nernst could fidget with the real thing.

It was not a big succes, but a named musical instrument is more unique than a named fractioning column or a named condensor.

Musician and painter chemist

2007-09-08T14:18:00.000+02:00

A lot of comments on Top 5 lists say :"Hey you forgot ...". Most of the time we did not forget that chemist but a disadvantage of a Top 5 list is that there can only be 5 chemists on a Top 5 list. (Sometimes we did forget someone who really should be on it ofcourse).

The next post will be about someone who should have been on the Top 5 musician chemists.

I hope to post it soon but the other author unavailable right now and I'm quite busy.

I can tell you this. It is not about an amature musician chemist.

Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted singing with his barytone voice (and could play the piano) and his wife playing the piano, performing at home.

Brønsted was a painter as well.

Lovely Vodka

2007-08-31T11:01:00.000+02:00

While drinking a bottle of Russian Standard Original I was closely inspecting the bottle. I thought I was just drunk but the next day I looked again and indeed there was the signature of the nuber 1 of the Top 5 alcoholic beverage chemists.

A Synthetic Environment Beast

2007-08-30T12:07:00.000+02:00

I looked at the profile of A SynthEnv and noticed the 'Profile Views'

The number of the beast on A SynthEnv! I wonder what The Beast himself would think of it.

Colorful but lousy glassware for sale!

2007-08-29T09:58:00.001+02:00

A lot of companies try to sell their lab equipment by sending those glossy catalogs with colorful pictures.

Glassware is always filled with some colored solution.

Okay, a few colors for a nice picture, I can understand that. But why all those silly pictures that makes you wonder if they know what they are selling?

The blue solution was refluxed in an erlenmeyer equipped with an Allihn condensor.

And there are things that are really weird.

Okay.. They are doing an extraction and one layer of the yellow solution is collected in a red erlenmeyer. The collected layer is stirred with a magnetic stirrer, while the distillate from a red solution in a retort on a burner is allowed do drip into the collected layer. This is done while enjoying a blue cocktail on dry ice. (Who uses a retort nowadays?)

I really think these guys want to tell you how bad their equipment is.
Distill a blue solution and the distillate is just as blue. This must be the most lousy distillation equipment there is.

Nature Chemistry! Looking for a job?

2007-08-29T09:56:00.000+02:00

Do you want to be an editor for Nature? See here.

Top 5 banknote chemists

2007-08-27T16:52:00.000+02:00

1) Louis Pasteur - 5 Francs, France
A colorful banknote with his portrait, lab-glassware and the Pasteur institue in Paris.
This building is now Pasteur's Museum where his tomb is.

2) Marie Curie and Pierre Curie - 500 fancs, France

Another colorful banknote, Pierre in the background and lab-glassware on the backside of the banknote. 100 times more value than Pasteur is quite an honor.

There is anothe banknote with Marie Curie, but this one is not that colorful.

20000 złoty, Poland1 złoty is about 0.36 USD, so you may think that this is a lot of money. But in 1995 after hyperinflation 10,000 old złotych became 1 new złoty. This old banknote represents about 0.7 USD.

3) Janet Mullen - 20 pounds, ScotlandThe picture of a woman in the lab was used to refer to illustrate research and education. The banknote was issued in 1995 to mark the 300th anniversary of the Bank of Scotland. It took three months untill she realized that it was her picture on that banknote. When she spoke with the bank they gave her two of the £20 notes in a framed presentation case. In 2005 journalists of the RSC searched for the unknown chemist on the banknote.

4) Paul Ehrlich - 200 DMark, Germany

No very colorful but it has a portrait and a molcule of Arsphenamine on it.

5) Justus von Liebig - 100 Reichsmark, Germany

An old and dusty banknote for an old chemist.

Janet Mullen is the only chemist who's still alive, and the least famous as well.

Nobody knows what kind of banknotes will be issued in the future.Hmmmm, I hope not...

Top 5 depressed and nervous breakdown chemists

2007-08-22T11:19:00.001+02:00

There already was a Top 5 suicide chemists and we decided to exclude them for this list. It will not be a surprise that 3 of the 5 committed suicide and that one possibly did.

Top 5 depressed and nervous breakdown chemists

1) Wallace Hume Carothers (1896–1937)

Du Pont's brilliant polymer researcher was obsessed with the idea that is work was useless. He wasn't laughing much on photographs. With his friend and colleague Julian Hill they produced Nylon that went in production in 1939. According to Hill, Carothers could list all the famous chemists who had committed suicide. He added himself to that list in 1937 by ingesting cyanide. He used to carry a capsule of the poison on his watch chain.

2) Archibald Scott Couper (1831-1892)
Scott is credited with inventing the use of straight lines to indicate bonds and he developed the theory of chemical structure, namely that tetravalent carbon atoms can link together to form large molecules. He did this work simultaneously with Kekulé's work. In 1859 Couper had a nervous breakdown and entered a private mental institution. When he was released 3 month later he immediately suffered another breakdown. In 1862 he was released again from the institution. The 30 years thereafter his mother cared for him, he never published again.

3) Max Joseph von Pettenkofer (1818-1901)

The chemist and hygienist never seems happy on photos. He is a founder of epidemiology and is known for his research on the spread of cholera. When he wanted to prove his incorrect belief that cholera spread via the atmosphere rather than directly from person to person he made a soup made from the excrement of a dying cholera patient and took it for dinner. He became very ill but survived. At the end of his life suffered from depressions and he finally shot himself.

4) Viktor Meyer (1848–1897)
The discoverer of thiophene and inventor of the Victor Meyer apparatus studied under August Wilhelm von Hofmann, and later worked for Robert Bunsen. He was a hard working man. He became an overworked man suffering from nervous breakdowns. He continued to work and took sleeping pills that further damaged his nervous system. Like Carothers he committed suicide by taking cyanide.

5) Primo Michele Levi (1919–1987)
The chemist and writer said in later life that he suffered from depressions and at took anti-depressants. Concerns for his own health and the fear that he would not be able to write anymore, the care for his old and senile mother and mother in law and his memories as a holocaust survivor were probably some of the causes of his depressions. In 1987 he fell from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor. Possibly suicide.

Wöhler's posing skills

2007-08-16T12:42:00.001+02:00

I have added another picture to the Friedrich Wöhler gallery.
Wöhler was famous for his posing technique. His poses were copied by many people. This 'sitting with a stick-pose' was copied by Hans Christian Andersen.
Another writer saw the 'bent over with piercing look-pose' performed by Mendeleev.He decided to combine this with the 'sitting with a stick-pose', that is the origin of this famous picture of Oscar Wilde.
Hans Christian Andersen admired Wöhler posing skills and copied more of his poses.

The 'desk leaning-pose'
Wöhler was an expert on 'desk leaning-poses' and Andersen tried to copy them all.

Wöhler's poses were not copied by writers alone. His poses were so famous that even emperors copied them before Wöhler was born.

Alexander and Adolf

2007-08-13T13:49:00.000+02:00

I recently bought the opera Prince Igor.Composed by the #2 of the Top 5 musician chemists : Alexander Borodin (1833-1887).

As Jordan commented on the top 5-post, Borodin was both famous as a composer and as a chemist.

Borodin was a member of The Five (or 'The Mighty Handful') a musical partnership of Russian composers who met in St Petersburg between 1856-1870. The aim was to create a new style of Russian music.

Here is Borodin on a photograph with 'The Mighty Five', not the most insignificant composers.

The Mighty Five" (l to r) Modest Moessorgski, Nikolaj Rimski-Korsakov, Vladimir Stasov, Mili Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin

Six people on the mighty five picture? Well, Stasov was not a real member of the group. Stasov acted as a kind of advisor.

Here is Borodin on a photograph with another chemist, not the most insignificant chemist.

Borodin, Dmitri Mendeev (1860 during a holiday in Italy.)

So there I was, listening to Prince Igor, discovering that Borodin had quite some friends who were (or became) quite famous. A few days after I bought Prince Igor I saw Borodin's name in a newspaper report.

Lew Besymenski, a Soviet intelligence officer who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, found a record collection in Hitler's chancellery in May 1945 when he was ordered to make a search shortly after Berlin fell to the Red army. Mr Besymenski did not mention the collection in his lifetime, because he was worried he might be accused of looting.

After Besymenski's death this summer the collection came in broad daylight. Besides the obvious contents, works of Wagner Beethoven and Bruckner, the collection contained record of Jewish and Russian composers/musicians, including records of Alexander Borodin.

Hitler may have had a taste for good music (Hmm, can't imagine that Hitler had a good taste for anything.), but I don't think he knew something about chemistry.

What they said: Chemists going to WWI

2007-08-02T15:11:00.000+02:00

Otto Hahn going to Ypres to give Haber a hand

Fritz Haber explaining how to use his poison gas

Walther Nernst inspecting the use of an irritant powder in shrapnel shells

Marie Curie driving her mobile X-ray unit the 'petit Curie'

Pelger-Huët, pince-nez and the Top 5 pince-nez chemists

2007-07-31T15:10:00.000+02:00

I was reading some bio-stuff and encountered a story about the Pelger-Huët anomaly; a congenital disorder in which granulocyte nuclei fail to segment normally. In heterozygotes most granulocytes have bilobed nuclei.This is often called a pince-nez cell.

You don't see them a lot nowadays those pince-nez things. The last I've seen was a sun-pince-nez.

A pince-nez (meaning 'pinch-nose') is very nice equipment for a chemist. Sure a beard, moustache, good pose, lousy way of dying, statue and a lousy grave are great, but a pince-nez is something that can make you quite distinguished and it's for women too.

So, now it's time for the:

Top 5 pince-nez chemists

1) Emil Fischer

The man always looked the same. It is said that he was born with a beard and a pince-nez.

2) Walther Nernst
3) Fritz Haber

He lost his hair but gained confidence and stopped using a pince-nez safety line.

4) Henri Louis Le Chatelier
5) Moses Gomberg

Decided to wear a pince-nez although his big ears were perfectly suited to place temples over.

# 3 of the Top 5 old Tour de France drugs

2007-07-27T08:50:00.000+02:00

In the Top 5 old Tour de France drugs the third place was missing. Number 3 is a bit mysterious.

3) Trimethyl

You may wonder: Trimethyl what? Trimethylsilyl azide? Trimethylsulfonium iodide?

Well, I don't know. Nobody knows it seems.

The British cyclist, Arthur Linton from Wales is often reported as the first cyclist who died because of drugs.

It is often said that Linton died in 1886 because of an overdose 'trimethyl'. This trimethyl stuff must be quite awesome because ten years after his death Linton won the race Bordeaux - Paris (1896).

In 1896 Linton died again, this time of typhoid fever, a few weeks after Bordeaux - Paris.

And here they write

Arthur Linton, an English cyclist died from the effects of a stimulant (trimethyl) while riding in the Tour de France.

The first Tour de France was in 1903, so Linton died at least three times.

This trimethyl-something is quite amazing.

Top 5 old Tour de France drugs

2007-07-26T15:25:00.000+02:00

In France there is this cycling competition going on. The guy who is the quickest wears the yellow jersey and is then kicked out of the competition because of suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.

In the 1930’s amphetamines entered the sport, killing Tommy Simpson in 1967.

Hormones came and in the 1990’s EPO was preferred. Blood transfusions and testosterone are now the hypes in the Tour.

The first Tour was in 1903, and it is quite amazing what drugs they took back then.

Top 5 old Tour de France drugs

1) Ethanol
Ethanol was used to obtain a fuddled state and relief pain.

The Algerian Abdel-Kader Zaaf drank two bottles of wine in the tour of 1950. He fell asleep under a tree. When he woke up he got on his bike again but proceeded to ride the wrong way on the course.

Quite performance enhancing indeed...

2) Chloroform
Used to fight pain. Henri Pelissier admitted the use of chloroform (and cocaine) after the tour of 1924.

4) Strychnine
A powerful and deadly stimulant. This highly toxic alkaloid was injected. A large dose was not recommended.

5) Nitroglycerin
Nitroglycerin capsules were taken to increase the heart rate and open the airways. Bumpy rides were not recommended.

Top 5 musician chemists

2007-07-23T14:01:00.000+02:00

On the Element titled albums-post Ashutosh commented : 'Now is the time to do a Top 5/10 musician chemists'. A top 10 list is out of the question here (top 5 only) and requests are often ignored but this 'Top 5 list' was already on our 'Top 5 lists to do list'. The candidates were already there, so here is the final list.

Top 5 musician chemists

1) Sir Edward William ElgarThe famous English composer was an amateur chemist. In his house in Hereford he had a basement lab where he experimented. Later he moved his lab to his garden shed which he called 'The Ark' (because doves were nesting there). He invented a machine to produce hydrogen sulfide and made explosions by handling phosphoric waste carelessly.

2) Alexander Borodin A Russian chemist and composer. Gave his name to the Hunsdiecker-Borodin reaction and is a codiscoverer of the aldol reaction. He wrote opera, symphonies, chamber music, piano suites and more. He was a member of The Five (or 'The Mighty Handful') a group of Russian composers who met in St Petersburg between 1856-1870. The other members were Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

3) Fletcher Henderson

Received a master's degree in chemistry in 1920 but was unable to find a job because of the color of his skin. He decided to earn his money with music and formed a jazz big band in 1922. In 1924 Louis Armstrong joined his band. As a pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer Henderson had a big influence on big band jazz and Swing music.

4) Lejaren Hiller Hiller received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1947. From 1947 to 1952 Hiller worked as a research chemist for DuPont in Waynesboro, Virginia where hedevelopped a method for dyeing acrylic fibers. Hiller studied composition as well. He became a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of Illinois in 1952 but in 1958, he transferred to the music faculty. In 1968 Hiller became a professor of composition at the University of Buffalo. Hiller founded the Experimental Music Studios in Illinois.

5) Emil Votoček

Votoček was professor of Experimental Inorganic Chemistry and Organic Chemistry at the Czech technical University. His most important chemical work was in carbohydrate chemistry. He wrote chamber music, orchestral pieces and piano sonatas. Votoček also contributed in the field of linguistics. He spoke 7 languages fluently, wrote dictionaries and did translations.

Top 5 failed chemists

2007-07-18T13:27:00.000+02:00

1) Franz Kafka

Studied chemistry at the German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague for two weeks. He switched to sudy law and became a writer.

2) Cindy Crawford

Studied chemical engineering at Northwestern University for three months.

3) Isaac Newton

Filled his days with alchemical experiments. The only substantial achievement in this area was causing mental illness by mercury poisoning.

4) Oliver Sacks

Wrote one of the most popular book about chemistry (Uncle Tungsten) but never studied chemistry. Grew up in a chemistry-minded family. As a boy he was fascinated by chemistry, but he became a neurologist.

5) Knute Rockne
Worked as a chemistry research assistant under Julius Nieuwland at the Notre Dame University but stopped doing science to dedicate his life to football.

Named chemical process patents

2007-07-16T14:44:00.001+02:00

Baekeland Process – Leo Baekeland; US942699 (production of bakelite)
Bosch-Meiser Process – Carl Bosch and Wilhelm Meiser; US1429483 (production of urea)

Creighton Process – Henry Jermain Creighton; US1612361 (reduction of sugars)

Gibbs Process – Harry Gibbs; US1285117 (production of phtalic anhydride)

Haber-Bosch Process – Fritz Haber; US971501 (production of ammonia)

Raecke(or Henkel) process – Bernhard Raecke/Henkel&Cie Gmbh; DE936036 (production of terephthalic acid)

Twitchell Process - Ernst Twitchell; US601603 (cleavage of fatty acids)

Tyrer Process – Daniel Tyrer; US1210725 (sulfonation of hydrocarbons)

There are more named processes but I was not prepared to do more patent searching, maybe some other day.

Element titled albums

2007-07-12T15:33:00.000+02:00

Chembark and Carbon based curiosities recently spoke about a connection between music and chemistry (Tom Lehrer and Heavy Metal).

So, there is a connection between music and elements. There are many album with an element title .

There are 'metal element titled albums'.

Palladium by Autopsia

Plutonium by Inca Babies

Or 'two metal elements titled albums'.

Silver & Gold - Neil Young

There are 'non-metal element titled albums'.

Helium by Urban Myth club

Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre

There are album titles with element symbols as well.

H2O by Hall & Oates

H2SO4 by The Waves

But these are 'compound titled albums' instead of 'element titled albums'.

This raises the question : 'Are there chemical reaction titled albums?'

Chemical reaction by Vodka Collins

Nice try, but this doesn't qualify.

This may qualify.

H to He (Who am the only one) - Van der Graaf Generator

Okay, the sun's conversion of Hydrogen to Helium by nuclear fusion is not a real chemical reaction, but it is a reaction and they use the element symbols. English 70's progressive rock by Peter Hammill et al featuring the fabulous Robert Fripp is nice for a while.

Top 5 molecular model DNA guys

2007-07-04T17:21:00.000+02:00

1) The Nobel DNA guys - Francis Crick and James Watson

2) The other Nobel DNA guy - Maurice Wilkins

3) The Z-DNA guy - Alexander Rich

4) The non-Nobel X-ray diffraction DNA guys - Raymond Gosling and Herbert Wilson

5) The almost DNA guy - Linus Pauling
Unfortunately there is no photo of Rosalind Franklin with a molecular model.

Top 5 alcoholic beverage chemists

2007-07-04T16:57:00.000+02:00

1) Dmitri Mendeleev
Wrote the dissertation 'On combining alcohol and water'. He discovered that 38% was the perfect strength, giving the most homogeneous mixture. Mendeleev formulated new state standards for the production of vodka. 40% was the vodka standard because spirits were taxed on their strength, resulting in easier calculation.

2) Aeneas Coffey
In 1809 Coffey became surveyor of excise in Ireland, in charge of opreations against illicit distilling. In 1810 Coffey was severly beaten by moonshining countrymen when he tried to close down illegal stills. In 1821 Coffey patented the Coffey still. In 1835 he founded Aeneas Coffey & Sons, the firm still exists under the name John Dore & Co Ltd.

3) Louis Pasteur
Discovered that fermentation is caused by microorganisms while he was trying to sort out the problems of a fermentation process of a distillery. He also discovered that not all yeast is the same, and that not all yeast makes fine beer.

4) Angelo Mariani
Invented Vin Mariani in 1863, bordeaux wine with cocaine and became a wealthy man. Vin Mariani is not commercially available anymore.

5) Chemgeek (Eric W.)
For further information please visit: http://homebrewandchemistry.blogspot.com/

A chemist and a ghost

2007-06-29T12:13:00.000+02:00

Is this a chemist?

No, this is Florence Cook (1856-1904), a British medium who held seances in the 1870's. She was able to evoke a spirit. With Florence's gift the spirit was able to materialize. This spirit was made of a mysterious substance ectoplasm. The name of this spirit was Katie King. The biggest advantage of a materialized spirit is the fact that you are able to take pictures of it.

During a show she would disappear behind a curtain where she would make weird sounds. After a while the materialized spirit (who strangely enough looked just like Florence) would enter the room from behind the same curtain.
You may think:'So What? Why this nonsense? Was this Katie King ghost a chemist?'.

No, but there is this picture of Katie King. The spirit has her hands on the shoulder of this man.
The chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) with impressive moustache and nice beard.

Crookes studied under the legendary August Wilhelm von Hofmann, he did extensive research on spectroscopy and cathode rays and discovered the element Thallium. He was president of the Royal Society. He was knighted in 1897 because of his scientific achievements. So Crookes was far from a second-class scientist.

Crookes investigated several mediums. His collaboration with Cook is the most famous. He attended many seances and made pictures of the Katie King spirit. His believe in such pseudoscience received a lot of criticism from the scientific community.

In order to prove that Florence Cook and Katie King were two different beings he wanted to make a picture that shows both of them. Ohh... the face of the spirit is covered with a blanket, that's a bummer.

Crookes appears in many theosophic writings as well, including Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds.

In this book there is a periodic system with the title : Periodic Law (after Crookes).

Adyarium and Occultum are there as elements and new series of elements, closely related to the rare gasses. They were called meta-element (meta-neon, meta-argon). When Francis Aston discovered isotopes he used Crookes' terminology and called 22Ne meta-neon.

There are still people who believe that Besant et al discovered isotopes because they described 22Ne. A lot of things they wrote about the meta-elements is not consistent with what we now know about isotopes.

Crookes, like others, believed in an elementary unit of matter, called protyle. Leadbeater and Besant studied this as well with their astral vision. Now there are people who say that they discovered quarks.

Adyarium and Occultum

2007-06-26T16:09:00.000+02:00

There is medicinal, organic, bio, theoretical, inorganic, astro, green, surface, polymer, petro, analytical, nuclear, computational, photo, organometallic, physical and a lot more chemistry.

There is a another research area: Occult Chemistry. You don't hear much about it nowadays.

A lot of the ludicrous research in this area was done by Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Wood (AKA Annie Besant). The work that was done between 1895 and 1933 is described in the book: Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds.

Besant and Leadbeater were important figures in the theosophical society. Besant was a pupil of the notorious Helena Petrovna Hahn (AKA H.P. Blavatsky).

Both Besant and Leadbeater were clairvoyants, and used this gift to examine atoms and molecules. They made drawings of structures of the elements and their compounds.When they were looking at air with their second sight they discovered a new element with an atomic weight of 3 and they called it Occultum. Later they discovered yet another element, Adyarium, with atomic weight 2 (and they knew that is was not deuterium but a real new element.)

Leadbeater and Besant are often called charlatans, but they were not. Their idiocy was sincere.

It would be great if they performed some synthesis.

Incredibly incredible

2007-06-22T15:09:00.000+02:00

Angewandte Chemie International Edition wants to convince us of the fact that it is the best journal there is. In the last few issues they inserted a page with shrieking text in the graphical abstracts.
I can’t wait for the next issue to appear. Maybe this blog will inspire them to have an issue with articles by bearded chemists only.

Tongue mystery

2007-06-20T12:48:00.000+02:00

Still there is the question: Is it Ehrenfest or Debye? here on the 1927 Solvay conference video made by Irving Langmuir.
Comparing moustaches can give a clue. As Ashutosh said : Debye had a more Charlie Chaplin-like moustache. You can see this clearly on the famous group picture of the conference.

Here is Ehrenfest, from the same picture.
The 2 minutes video Ehrenfest contains several shots of Ehrenfest. Debye is there two or three times, just a brief moment.

Here he is with the Charlie Chaplin moustache again. In this frame his face seems to be a bit narrower.

It makes you wonder: was he was separated at birth from John Cleese.Debye isn't doing a silly walk though.

Here is Ehrenfest with Debye laughing in the background.His head appears to be polymorphous. When laughing his moustache appears to go from the Chaplin conformation into a broad moustache.I tend to believe that the tongue guy is Ehrenfest. Look at the last frame.
And compare it with this shot of Ehrenfest laughing at the camera.
Yeah, it must be Ehrenfest.... Ehhh... When I see the first frame of the 'stick out tongue'-sequence and look at this picture of Debye I'm in doubt again

The tongue guy is just a Ehrenfest-Debye blend separated at birth from John Cleese.

WRONG?

2007-06-18T21:53:00.000+02:00

The previous post may contain false information about the identity of the person on the 'tongue picture'. We had a short discussion about it. We compared the moustache of Ehrenfest and Debye around that time and came to the conclusion that the person on the picture might indeed be Ehrenfest as Ashutosh said (and not a chemist). We may have had some false information. (See comments on previous post).

Maybe sorry.

Stolen idea: Separated at birth?

2007-06-18T15:51:00.000+02:00

In this post there was a a picture of a (physical) chemist with the question 'Do you recognized the guy?' Ashutosh gave an aswer that provided an idea for this post.

One in ten thousand had two nice nonsense posts called Separated at birth? (All non-nonsense posts are quite nice as well!) So here is my 'Separated at birth?'.

Paul Ehrenfest

Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije (Peter Debeye)

So the guy was Debije (who, later, changed his name to debye). One of the great early Dutch Nobel prize winners (Van 't Hoff, Van der Waals, Lorentz, Zeeman, Kamerlingh-Onnes). This picture is a frame from the video of the famous fifth Solvay conference. Many attendees were or became Nobel prize winners (this conference is probably famous because of the video).

There seems to be a discussion going on in the Netherlands about Debye. He was director of the physics section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (in that time he (co)fouded the Max Plack institue) untill 1939, and it is said he actively participated in the removal of Jews from the German scientific community.

Many things have been said about this period of his career.

'It's a shame he worked for the Nazi's!'
'He had to because of the German laws!'
'He helped Jews (like Lise Meitner) to escape Germany!'
and so on and so on....

I don't know the true story. One thing is clear: he was not a murderer but he was a great chemist. Let those silly Dutch guys have their discussion about whether the 'Debye Institute' must be called 'Former Debeye Institute' as it is done now. I don't care (never been there), I'm sure Debye doesn't care. (who cares when he's dead?)

And now for something completely different... (I already spoke about stamps a while ago.)

I understand that there is a Dutch stamp with Debye on it.

Why is there a Debye stamp from Ghana?

Dignifying Science

2007-06-14T11:19:00.000+02:00

This is great!

From G.T. Labs : Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists

The numbers 1, 2 and 3 of the Top 5 female chemists are in this comic. Several other chemists play a role as well.

Top 5 headgear chemists, and what they said

2007-06-13T22:22:00.001+02:00

1) Petrus Debije (to Annie Schrödinger and Arnold Sommerfeld, Zürich 1926)

2) Otto Hahn (in the trenches of Ypres, WWI)

3) Svante Arrhenius (in Sptisbergen, Norway 1896)

4) Linus Pauling
5) Alexander Rich (let's just call him a chemist for this list)

Famous tongue

2007-06-13T09:38:00.000+02:00

We had a discussion; What is the most famous chemist picture?

This picture of Mendeleev is quite famous.Well... famous... Chemists know this guy, but not everybody. A lot of people won't say :"aahh, that's Mendeleev," when they see this picture.

So, who is the most famous chemist? (We mean chemists that are famous for their scientific work, and not something else... like Margaret Thatcher.)

We believe it must be this chemist, most people who see this picture will say: "Hey, that's Curie". So this may be the most famous chemist picture.
And who is the most famous scientist? Newton? Darwin? No... It must be Einstein.

His formula is famous, his theory is famous, his brain is famous.

Even his tongue is famous. This may be the most famous scientist picture.
Did you know that Einstein was inpired by a chemist to pose in this manner?
Recognize him?

Sorry, a top 5 chemist tongues was a bit difficult to do.

Top 5 chemist smoking styles

2007-06-12T11:16:00.000+02:00

The number 1 should be:

Smoking in a sedan chair carried by Stuart Schreiber (the bearded chemist) and other students. (The Schreiber information was provided by Ashutosh.)

Robert Burns Woodward

Bob already became number 1 on the Top 5 chemist transportation modes with this picture, so we decided not give him him another number 1 place with the same picture.

1) Smoking sigars with a bald head style

Fritz Haber

2) Nuclear Fission smoking

Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassmann, Otto Hahn

3) Smoking while reading slumped in a chair with the cigarette in the mouth style

Walther Nernst

4) Smoking while leaning head on hand and staring aimlessly style

Friedrich Bergius

5) Smoking with wriggling hands style

Lars Onsager

Top 5 missing pictures

2007-06-08T12:40:00.000+02:00

The picture-density of this blog is quite high. It is great to find pictures of people that gave their name to a reaction or glassware. Most people are found easily.

Otto Dimroth

Walther Mathias Hempel

Always nice to see whether they had a beard, moustache, no hair at all or a pince-nez.

Some pictures are hard to find. It may reamin a mystery who had a big nose, beard, Cleft lip or whatever.

Top 5 missing pictures

1) Henri Vigreux

2) Aeneas Coffey
Coffey died in 1852, so there is a big chance that there are no photographs of this guy.

3) Ernest W. Dean and David D. Stark

4) Felix Richard Allihn

5) Heinz Hunsdiecker and Clare Hunsdiecker

Top 5 spirit stills

2007-06-06T17:01:00.000+02:00

1) Pot still/alembic

Talisker Distillery Carbost, Isle of Skye

Used to prepare malt whisky or cognac (batch distillation). Pot stills are the modern version of the alembic.

2) Mobile distillation unitDriving from farmer to farmer in Normandy to turn their fermented apples into Calvados.

3) Coffey still (patent still) Double column continuous still for the production of grain whisky, patented by Aeneas Coffey in 1831, works with steam. There is a paper about Coffey in Annals of Science, 1968, 24, 1, 53 (I wish I had free access). ---- Ahhh thanks for sending D.-----

4) bamboo stillInexpensive and readily available hollow bamboo pipes to collect distillate.

5) Moonshine still

This can be anything, made from beer kegs, milk cans, oil drums, cooking pans, boilers etc. etc.

Post 100

2007-06-01T11:27:00.000+02:00

This post number 100!!! (so what?)

Time to look back 100 years. What is the best article in JACS of 100 years ago (june 1907)?

JACS, 1907, 6, 942

This is so nice. A brass strip with white corks as hydrogen atoms, black corks as carbon atoms, and springs.

In order to obtain a the ring structure the model is bent round to form a circle.
Beautiful! More than 40 years after Kekulé's paper!

You could make more proposed structure (like the ones from Ladenburg, Dewar, Adolf Claus, Armstrong and Baeyer) with meccano as a hobby. The Claus/Armstrong-Baeyer benzene model is easily constructed the paper says, but the most important message is the endline.

I haven't received it yet...
---------------------------------

Greg the chemist (Carbontet) commented on this post:

Interesting. After this paper was published, Prof. Lang became a commanding officer at the University of Toronto during WWI.

Here's a link to his portrait.

http://www.alumni.utoronto.ca/groups/Soldiers/illustrations/lang.jpg

"Colonel W. R. Lang VD was the first Commanding Officer of the University of Toronto Contingent COTC. He commanded it during and after the First World War (1914-1925) and later became the first Director of Military Studies at this University. He was appointed to The Canadian General Staff in 1914 and among other responsibilities was in charge of Coast Defence in the Maritimes in 1918. Before the war he was a professor of Chemistry at this University. He was president of the Canadian Operatic Society."

Top 5 chemist transportation modes

2007-05-31T11:37:00.001+02:00

1) Robert Burns Woodward in a sedan chair carried by his students while smoking.

2) Otto Hahn at the back of a truck going to the frontline of WWI while playing guitar.

3) Linus Pauling, inspired by Hahn to travel at the back of a vehicle.

4) Marie Curie driving a mobile radiography unit (Petit Curie) to the frontlines of WWI.

5) Irène Joliot-Curie traveling in the cargo hold of a 'Petit Curie' while her mother is driving.

Top 5 chemists with Einstein and what they said

2007-05-30T17:01:00.000+02:00

1) Fritz Haber
2) Walther Nernst
3) Marie Curie 4) Irène Joliot-Curie
5) Chaim Weizmann

Liebig gallery

2007-05-28T20:20:00.000+02:00

We received an email yesterday. It was Justus, complaining that his friend had a gallery on this blog and he did not. We had to promise to honour him as well, otherwise he would haunt us for the rest of our pathetic lives.

So here it is.

St. Emil

2007-05-26T12:02:00.001+02:00

Germany has the most chemist statues. Perhaps Germany just has the most statues, could well be. There are statues with some similarities. Like these statues.

Justus von Liebig Denkmal, Giessen

Emil Fischer Denkmal, Berlin

Some similarities are obvious, both statues are German chemist statues in Germany. Another similarity is that you will only find black and white pictures of these statues. The reason is because of another similarity; both statues were destroyed in WWII. That's a shame...

The Fischer statue has been reproduced as a bronze statue (instead of stone, like the original). So we can look at the reproduction in color.
Emil looks like a monk, or better: a saint. Was Saint Fancis from Assisi his great great great grandfather perhaps?
St. Emil... Yes he was a holy chemist..

Another blog

2007-05-25T16:39:00.000+02:00

A synthetic environment is on the blogroll of this blog.

www.chem-station.com/blog/

I like that!

Ehhh... You might want to use this link.

The Dehn-Hartman apparatus

2007-05-25T14:46:00.001+02:00

Have you ever heard of the Dehn-Hartman apparatus. It is a great piece of equipment.
Do you know the purpose of this thing? Here is a hint: Dehn and Hartman are those guys, and the device is described here:

JACS 1914, 36, 2114

I'll explain the thing. In case you need it one day.

Urine in flasks A is dispensed with siphons into bottle B where the urine is passed through an ether layer. The water layer is dispensed into flask C with a siphon. Flask C is heated so that ether that came with the water layer is vaporized and condensed in the condser on top of bottle B. The ether layer is dispensed with a syphon into flask D and concentrated, leading the vaporized ether into the condenser back into bottle B.

So what we have is something like an continuous urine extraction and concentration device. The Dehn-Hartman apparatus is just brilliant.

Amazing and expanding blogosphere

2007-05-22T15:54:00.000+02:00

Have a look at this new blog: totallyretrosynthetic.

http://totallyretrosynthetic.blogspot.com/

Lavoisier's mercury gasometer

2007-05-18T13:54:00.000+02:00

The Lavoisiers were number 5 in the Top 5 husband and wife chemists excluding Curie.

I just noticed that on the table they have the number 4 of the Top 5 chemistry relics, the mercury gasometer, used to identify chemical properties of oxygen (1774).

Musée des arts et métiers - Cnam, Paris, France

It's a pity that the tube that goes into the gasometer and the mercury is missing.

Friedrich Wöhler gallery

2007-05-17T14:02:00.000+02:00

It's not complete, but it's a start.

Urinod

2007-05-16T13:26:00.000+02:00

You may think that concentrating urine on large scale is just for alchemists in the 17th century... well, it's not.

Have a look at this lovely paper.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1914, 36, 2136

In order to isolate the so-called Urinod they concentrated a lot of urine.Unfortunately they do not tell how they obtained the urine.

I'm very pleased that I do not have to reproduce their experiment.

And I am very happy that I didn't work in that lab at that time.

After fifteen months they were just unable to smell anymore I think.

And what is this Urinod that makes our urine smell?

I can't believe it... and I'm not the only one.

Escher epoxide

2007-05-15T16:21:00.000+02:00

Chemists already made a molecular Moebius strip.

Who will make the first Escher epoxide? (Well... sometimes you see papers that draw the stereochemistry as if they made such a compound.)
Who will make the first molecular Escher cube? (Ohh, what a poor drawing I made there...)

Another nice quote

2007-05-04T09:52:00.000+02:00

Chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that I'd die before I'd change places with the Persian King.

Johann Joachim Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1669

Top 5 chemist caricatures

2007-05-01T16:26:00.000+02:00

1) Lavoisier experimenting on Napoleon (James Gillray, he used the same scene for this caricature)2) Mendeleev dreaming over his potential election to the Russian academy of sciences (Strekoza, 1880, reprint here) 3) Joseph Priestley as Doctor Phlogiston4) Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (William Barry Jensen)5) Curie (Vanity Fair 1904)

Top 5 husband and wife chemists excluding Curie

2007-04-27T12:18:00.000+02:00

1) Heinz Hunsdiecker and Clare Hunsdiecker

Published :Über den Abbau der Salze aliphatischer Säuren durch Brom (Chem. Ber. 1942, 75, 291). We should call it the Hunsdiecker-Hunsdiecker reaction.

2) Fritz Haber and Clara Haber

Clara shot herself in 1915 because she did not like the chemistry he did in those days.

3) Louis Fieser and Mary Fieser

4) Walter Noddack and Ida Noddack

5) Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and Marie Anne Lavoisier

Fractioning columns II

2007-04-20T10:11:00.000+02:00

Snyder is identified! (see previous post)

In a paper the inventor is mentioned; E.O. Snyder of the Barret company. (Laboratory Fractionating Columns; Ind. Eng. Chem. 1927, 19, 379)

The paper contains this drawing of columns.

Great, more work to do.

Wurtz column - Charles Adolphe Wurtz (that was easy)

Henninger-Le Bel column - J.A. Le Bel and Arthur Henninger (Henninger is mentioned here)

Glinsky column and Young column (often referred to as a Young and Thomas column) are not identified yet.

In Ind. Eng. Chem. Anal. Ed. 1931, 3, 377 a few other columns are mentioned. Brunn, Brown, Taylor.... Even more work to do.

Taylor column - Hugh S. Taylor

Catalytic Dehydration of C6-C8 Aliphatic Alcohols; J. Am. Chem. Soc, 1939, 61, 1751

Brunn column - Johannes H. Brunn

Laboratory Rectifying Columns with Non-Siphoning Bubbling-Cap Plates; Ind. Eng. Chem. Anal. Ed, 1929, 1, 212

We hope to find Brown some day.

Fractioning columns

2007-04-19T14:19:00.000+02:00

Named condensers were done, and Vigreux was identified. Now it is time for us to spend some time on other named fractioning columns.

Dufton column - Samuel Felix Dufton (1867–1943)

Hempel column - Walther Mathias Hempel (1851-1916)

Holzman column - George Holzman
Distillation Equipment Suitable for Centigram and Decigram Quantities; Anal. Chem. 1948, 20, 361

Stedman column - Donald Frank Stedman (1900-1967)

Column with special packing, used for industrial distillation.GB451014
US2227164

Widmer column - Gustav Widmer Über die fraktionierte Destillation kleiner Substanzmengen; Helv. Chim. Act. 1924, 7, 59

Oldershaw column - C.F. Oldershaw

Perforated Plate Columns for Analytical Batch Distillations; Ind. Eng. Chem. Anal. Ed. 1941, 265

Snyder Column - not yet identified

Friedrichs condenser in wikipedia

2007-04-19T09:19:00.000+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_condenser

Top 5 hair loss chemists

2007-04-17T16:06:00.000+02:00

1) August Wilhelm von Hoffmann

2) Fritz Haber

3) Ira Remsen

Notice the nice 'only on the cheeks moustache-design'.

4) Linus Pauling

5) Hermann Staudinger

You may have noticed that the author is now called 'Synthetic Environment'. Een of andere vent is giving input for post ideas now so we decided to use just one author. (Well, there are people who think there is just one author.)

Een of andere vent: Congratulations with your offspring!

Top 5 chemical warfare chemists

2007-04-17T12:28:00.000+02:00

1) Fritz Haber (1868-1934)
'The father of chemical warfare', Haber, initiated the use of poison gasses like chlorine in WWI. In the Second Battle of Ypres Germany deployed 180 tonnes of chlorine to kill Canadian and British troops. Fritz Haber developed Zyklon B as well, an agent that would later kill many members of his family. Haber's wife disliked Haber's warfare research and this was supposedly the reason she commited suicide.

2) Victor Grignard (1871-1935)
During WWI Grignard was Haber's counterpart. Working in Paris on the manufacture of phosgene for use as poison gas. Haber combined chlorine and phosgene to get an even more effective poison.

3) Alfred Nobel (1833-1896)
Nobel invented dynamite for the mining industry and filed a patent (US78317) in 1868. It made him very rich. The substance had some off-label use in various wars.

4) Gerhard Schrader (1903-1990)
'Father of the nerve agents'
Co)inventor of nerve agents like Tabun, Sarin, Soman and Cyclosarin. The most famous agent, sarin, was used by Iraq against Iran in the 1980-88 war.

5) Louis Fieser (1899-1977)

Invented formula for napalm for millitary use in 1943. Produced by Dow Chemical in WWII. Napalm is well known because of use in the Vietnam war by the USA.

Lovely stamps, wonderful stamps

2007-04-16T15:43:00.000+02:00

When you have two Nobel prizes, what else would you like?

How about at least 59 stamps!

Turkey, France, Senegal, Poland, India
St Helena, Ireland, Poland, Monaco, Soviet Union, Afars and Issas
Somalia, Poland, North Korea, Central Africa, Malagasy
Belgium, Congo, Central Africa, Sweden, Mali
Turkey, Moldavia, Djibouti, Suriname, Cuba, Poland
Barbuda, Poland, Poland, Poland, DDR, San Marino
Sharjah, North Korea, Albania, Guinea, Palau, Congo, Turkey
Liberia, Nicaragua, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Afghanistan, Cuba
Togo, Indochina, Panama, Poland, Monaco, Monaco
Tchad, Angola, Monaco, Afghanistan, Afghanistan
Somalia

Top 5 materials chemists they like

2007-04-16T11:06:00.000+02:00

Check out Carbon-based Curiosities for the Top 5 materials chemists we like. A nice list with living chemists only.

Top 5 suicide chemists

2007-04-12T15:38:00.000+02:00

1) Emil Fischer (1852-1919)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1902.
His son Walther commited suicide in 1915 and another son Alfred died of typhoid fever in 1917.
Suffering from intestinal carcinoma, pain resulting from his excessive exposure to phenylhydrazine and the loss of his sons in WWI, he committed suicide in 1919 (anybody who knows how?). Before he took his life he finalized his testament and submitted his last two papers for publication (Hoppe-Seylers Z. Physiol. Chem. 1919, 107, 176-202. and Hoppe-Seylers Z. Physiol. Chem. 1919, 108, 3-8. A nice biography can be found here (Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2002, 24, 4095).

2) Hans Fischer (1881-1945)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1930.
He committed suicide on 31 March 1945 in Munich after his institute and his work were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during the last days of World War II.

3) George R. Price (1922-1975)
Physical chemist, population geneticist and science journalist. He started his career as an instructor in chemistry at Harvard University. He dedicated his later life to helping the homeless. He committed suicide by cutting his throat with a pair of nail scissors. Friends said he committed suicide because of despondency over his inability to continue helping the homeless.

4) Nicolas Leblanc (1742-1806)
French chemist developed a process for making sodium carbonate from sodium chloride. The Revolutionary government seized his patent and factory in 1794. The factory was handed back to him by Napoleon in 1802 but he didn't have the money to get back in production. A broken and depressed man, Leblanc used a gun to kill himself.

5) Harold Watkins
Sulfanilamide, a drug used to treat streptococcal infections was used as tablet and as an injectable. To market the drug for children and patients who preferred to take their medications in liquid forms, the chief chemist of S.E. Massengill Co. Harold cole Watkins tried to find a way to liquefy the drug. He discovered the drug dissolved in diethylene glycol. Without testing the drug 1300 bottles were distributed. 107 people died. This incident was the impetus for the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

After this '1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident' Watkins shot himself. (Some say it was an accidental shot while cleaning his gun.)

Top 5 chemists with presidents/kings/emperors and what they said

2007-04-10T22:16:00.000+02:00

1) Emil Fischer to Kaiser Wilhelm II
2) Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock to George Bush

3) John Fenn to King Carl XIV Gustaf

4) Linus Pauling to Gerald Ford

5) Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan

Carbon Tet

2007-04-05T19:24:00.000+02:00

Carbon Tet, I am wondering what this blog will do.

what they said; Pauling & Fleming

2007-04-05T10:36:00.001+02:00

What's all that stuff on Sir Alexander Fleming desk?

Why is Linus demonstrating?

Chinese Dean-Stark

2007-03-30T12:19:00.000+02:00

A Chinese person commented on the Dean-Stark post:

‘I am using the apparatus and looking for the information of inventor to write dean-stark apparatus for chinese wikipedia.Thank you for your answer.’

Here is the Chinese entry. The only Dean-Stark entry that gives the reference to the original paper and gives the names of the inventors. The fact that somebody uses this blog as information source proves the unreliability of Wikipedia :-)

Not a rotavap.

2007-03-30T10:10:00.000+02:00

I this the first rotavap? Een of andere vent asked here.

The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone, by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771

The answer is most likely: 'No'.

It is a concentrating device without a condensor and most likely without rotating abilities.

The painting shows Hennig Brand the german alchemist (c.1630–c.1710) who discovered phosphorus around 1669 by conentrating urine and heating the phosphate-containing residue. On this painting Brand is concentrating a solution containing the glowing phophorus.

Top 5 Chemist statues

2007-03-26T20:36:00.000+02:00

1) Joseph Priestly
Birmingham, Birstall, Leeds,UK

2) Justus von Liebig

Giesen (destroyed during WOII), Munich, Germany

3) Robert Bunsen

Heidelberg, Germany

4) Antoine Lavoisier

Paris, France

5) Benjamin Silliman
Yale's Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, USA

There are more chemist statues. For instance Mendeleev has two in Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Marie Curie in Japan (Soka University, Japan) and Kekulé in Bonn, Germany.

What they said; Cycling scientists

2007-03-26T09:44:00.000+02:00

A synthetic environment - reloaded

2007-03-23T09:11:00.001+01:00

Two weeks ago I mailed syntheticenvironment@gmail.com to tell Een of andere vent that I hoped he would not delete the blog and should continue to post things every now and then. He replied: ‘Do it yourself.’ I said that had no access to the blog. He gave me access. It turned out that I knew him.

He is my supervisor now. He wants me to call him Sir now, so we have a strict professional realationship. I do the work and he will say it was his idea. In the meantime Vent is just doing nothing besides having an Ellen Swallow Richards obsession and a special interest in facial hair. I will probably post less often than Vent did, but I’ll do my best.

Well this was his idea I must admit, a new category: What they said…

With Einstein on the beach

Vent demanded two other 'What they said' things in this post.

Deductive technique

Vent demanded facial hair things as well.

Recognize a genius

Vent spoke about his urinating behavior and I wonder if he could help me with this reduction I am working on.

JACS, 1900, 22, 309

New author

2007-03-22T12:16:00.000+01:00

Yep, someone is prepared to continue this blog for some time. He promised to publish the same kind of nonsense I did. I hope I do not have to sack him next month because of incompetency and being too serious, we'll see.

Get on with it, Snaack. (Silly name.)

Final post...

2007-03-15T16:46:00.000+01:00

Well.. The final post.

This blog will not be deleted, but it will be silent here now. I had plenty of ideas left though. I never wrote on named-reactions, and never searched for the original papers.

There is a lot more nonsense to write about facial hair of dead chemists and I could look for chemist hair style changes.

August Wilhelm von Hoffman

I could be searching for old pictures and old patents to collect autographs.

Beistein, Erlenmeyer

And I could do a 'top 5 chemists in front of blackboard'.

Schiff, Burns Woodward, Pauling, Nernst

There are other things that will keep me busy right now. A few months from now I might do the 'once a month posting thing'. Maybe some time I will start Synthetic environment - the sequel (or think of a less dull blog title). I don't know yet. If so, you'll hear.

So, I cease posting, now. I will not leave you, and will still be reading all the nice blogs that are out here.

A peasant from a plague village once said: I'm not dead!.

Decision... I quit.

2007-03-14T21:01:00.000+01:00

I started this blog 4 months ago and wrote 66 posts now. The amount of visitors has increased ever since. This blog reached the top 5 on chemical blogspace now, but I quit anyway. I do not have to write a thesis or lost my job, but I think I have done my trick. Sure, there are still a lot of 'top 5 lists' I can make up, and there is still a lot of science history to tell but that will be more of the same stuff....

Blogosphere is quite amazing. The moonshine post still attracts visitors, directed here by google and most blogs I read have this blog on their blogroll.

I really enjoyed writing all the nonsense like the Top 5 bearded chemists, LCMS analysis of coffee and Ageing and poses in chemistry. (My personel favourite is the article titles analysis-post.) I am fond of discovering the origins of the Vigreux collumn, the Rotavap and Markovnikov's rule, but when I have to think and do research for another post I think it is over.

So... this is the end... Well... the end for this blog, but not for blogosphere, one in ten thousand just started and you should go there. Carbon base curiosities will find new topics, I am sure. Chemical musings will post irony forever, a great blog as well! Jungfreudlich, very amusing and Kutti promised to write more in English, I am looking forward to it. Oh yeah, visit Homebrew and Chemistry, Chemgeek knows the meaning of life, beer is more important than chemistry.

Derek and Paul will be there forever, I think.

Visit the whole blogroll, kinasepro, tot. synth. etc. etc.

Ohhh shit, ψ*ψ, happy birthday!... a bit late... sorry.

I hope all you people enjoyed this blog.

The final post will be here within a week.

Cheers!

Listed list

2007-03-13T10:59:00.000+01:00

I discovered that the Top 5 dead chemists who died in really lousy ways, is now listed at listerate.com.

Another 'amazing discovery': this blog entered a top 5 itself, here at Chemical Blogspace. I do not know how the ranking is calculated. Maybe this post will kick me out of this top 5.

Top 5 lousy chemist graves

2007-03-12T20:46:00.000+01:00

The great chemists deserve a great grave.

Dmitri Mendeleev, August Kekulé

Some had their graves a bit overdone.

Louis Pasteur

A chemist can die in a lousy way, but a chemist can have a lousy grave as well.

Top 5 lousy chemist graves

1) Rosalind Franklin

Deserved a Nobel Prize and a decent grave.

2) Lise Meitner
Deserved a Nobel Prize and a decent grave as well.

4) Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
Received a Nobel Prize and a lousy grave.

4) Friedrich WöhlerWas elected number 1 of the dead chemists but has a simple and plain grave.

5) Sir William Henry Perkin

I have no picture. Simon Garfield was unable to locate the grave at the time he wrote the book Mauve. Someone found the neglected grave a few years later.

Alexander Shulgin

2007-03-08T21:41:00.000+01:00

I do not correct old 'Top 5 lists', but...

Russ said about the previous post:

'I am stunned that this list could even exist, and make no mention of Alexander Shulgin, who synthesiszed over 230 different phenylethylamines (i.e. amphetamines) and tryptamines (e.g. serotonin analogues) and tested many of them on himself! He published his work in journals like Nature and J. Med. Chem. and then went on to write two books: Phenylethylamines I Have known and Loved and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved, commonly known as PiHKAL and TiHKAL. I read most of PiHKAL many years ago, it is a fascinating read for chemistry (and/or recreational drug) enthusiasts.'

and Russ is right...

Top 5 recreational drug chemists

2007-03-06T19:36:00.000+01:00

1) Raphael Mechoulam
The guru of cannabinoid research. Identified delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol as active ingredient of Cannabis Sativa in 1964. Did extensive research (and still does) on the endocannabinoid system, and the therapeutic exploration of the cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 (there is a CB3 too, GPR55).

2) Albert Hofmann
The very old and famous LSD man.

3) Charles Romley Alder Wright
Lecturer on chemistry in St. Mary’s hospital Medical School in London, synthesized heroin in 1874. He tried to find a non-addictive alternative to morphine

Unaware of Wright's work Felix Hoffman synthesized it as well for Bayer in 1897. Hoffman synthesized vitamin C at the same time and Bayer marketed them both leading to a nice and famous ad.

4) Anton Köllisch
Synthesized MDMA in 1912 for Merck (Germany). A patent that included the substance was filed the same year (DE274350). MDMA is mentioned as a chemical formula. The tale that MDMA was developed as an appetite suppressor for soldiers but appeared to have side effects is incorrect as was shown by a study of Merck's archives. MDMA was an intermediate in the synthesis for clotting agents. Anton Köllisch died as a soldier in 1916.

5) Nagai Nagayoshi
Discovered ephedrine and synthesized methamphetamine from it in 1893. (Thought it would be nice to have a Japanese guy in the list.)

Glassware as mannequin

2007-03-06T14:40:00.000+01:00

I was doing some experiments with my new camera and took some pictures of some piece of lab-glassware. Using different sources of light and different backgrounds I got some nice images (no photoshopping).

top view

Know what it is?

Big bad industry

2007-03-02T15:29:00.000+01:00

Are there people that think you work in the big bad polluting industry or the industry where they do not want people to get healthy? Tell them there is always worse, and give them this book about I.G. Farben:

The crime and punishment of I.G. Farben by Joseph Borkin

You can get a free copy here.

If you want to read horrible patents.

Check out : DE438818, DE447913 about Blausäure, Later known as Zyklon-B(lausäure).
Developed as a pesticide but later used to commit massive war crimes.

DE447913; Haltbarmachen von Blausäure

'Making Hydrogencyanide not perishable'

Abbreviations

2007-03-02T12:24:00.000+01:00

Do you know those funny guys that say Journal of Organic Crap?

NaH = Nasty Harry
t-BuLi = this Burns Life
GPCR = Gives Pharmacochemists Crises Regularly
DMSO = Dissolves My Skin Often
LiHMDS = Listen, Handgloves Make Definitely Sense
abs.EtOH = absolute Eternal Ongoing Hangover

Top 5 beardless chemist moustache designs

2007-03-01T13:17:00.000+01:00

This had to be done since I already did the Top 5 bearded chemists.

1) The pince-nez/moustache combination

Walther Nernst, Henry Louis Le Chatelier

2) Victor's tangled food residue collecting moustache

Victor Grignard, Victor Goldschmidt

3) The moustache with extensions on the cheeks

James Crafts, Charles Pfizer

An improved design was the ‘only on the cheeks moustache’, developed by Charles-Adolphe Wurtz

4) The hanging moustache on round face with a piercing look

Alfred Werner, Theodor Curtius

This design is closely related to:

5) The modest moustache on round face

Carl Bosch, Peter Debije

The first rotavap?

2007-02-28T16:17:00.000+01:00

In this post I said that Lyman Creighton Craig invented the rotavap (1950) and that Walter Büchi made the 'modern design' (1957). I may have been wrong.

Is this alchemist using a rotavap almost 2 centuries before Craig?
The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone, by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.

What I hate about patents (part II)

2007-02-27T14:57:00.000+01:00

A while ago I already told what I hate about patents. Here is another example of the 'I'm not gonna tell you'- style.

Ah, that is enlightening...

Top 5 chemists who died in really lousy ways

2007-02-26T13:48:00.000+01:00

Chemgeek said in a comment here about Lavoisier that he could be included in the 'Top 5 dead chemists who died in really lousy ways'. A nice Top 5 to do I thought, so here we go. (Lavoisier was already number one in the Top 5 executed chemists so I decided not to include him.)

1) Ernest Julius Cohen (1869-1944) The Dutch physical chemist Cohen studied under Arrhenius, Moissan and wrote his thesis for a doctorate under J.H. van 't Hoff. Chemistry was a 'family-disease', his father Jacques was a chemist who had studied under Liebig and Bunsen. In 1901 Cohen was appointed extraordinary Professor of Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, and Professor of Inorganic and General Chemistry at the university of Utrecht in 1902. He was the first president of IUPAC. He worked on allotropy of metals (worked out the chemistry of tin pest), photographic chemistry, electrochemistry and he wrote on science history.

In 1941 Cohen's property was seized by the German occupier and became a house for German officers. Friendly neighbors took him and his wife into their house. After May 1942 he had to wear the yellow star of David to show that he was a Jew. In 1943 he wanted to visit the laboratory but was arrested and taken prisoner because 'he wanted to enter a public building'. Cohen was taken to the concentration camp Vught. The Council of the Dutch Chemical Society approached the S.S. authorities leading to Cohen's release. Despite the advice of friends, Cohen refused to go into hiding, because 'he had done nothing wrong'. He was arrested again on Febuary 28 1944, and taken to concentration camp Westerbork. The efforts of his friends to have him released were in vain. On March 3 he was transported to Auschwitz. About 2 days later he died there in a Nazi gas chamber.

2) Thomas Midgley (1889-1944)
Chemist and mechanical engineer Midgely developed TEL additive to petrol and CFC's as refrigerants. His work on TEL resulted in lead poisoning, but he recovered. Polio disabled him in 1940. He designed a device with strings and pulleys to lift him from his bed. On November 2 1944 he was strangled by this machine.

3) Pierre Curie (1859–1906)
After a luch meeting on April 19, 1906 Pierre crosses Rue Dauphine in Paris during heavy snowfall. He was intercepted by a horse-drawn wagon with a heavy load of military supplies. Pierre's skull was crushed under the carriage wheel.

4) Karen Wetterhahn (1949-1997)
Professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, Wetterhahn, spilled some dimethylmercury on her latex gloves on August 14, 1996. Five months later she began to have troubles with her speach and sense of balance. It turned out that the dimethylmercury had diffused through the gloves, and caused mercury poisining. she slipped into a coma and died June 8, 1997.

5) Dominique Burget (1965-2006)
A pressure vessel with ethene exploded in a research building of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Mulhouse, on March 24, 2006. Burget was working in a lab above, and was killed.

Clerihew

2007-02-23T12:05:00.000+01:00

Edmund Clerihew Bentley the inventor of the Clerihew wrote this clerihew.

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

There should be more chemist clerihews. So I made a start.

Marie Curie,
Not hard to see,
Was glowing with pride,
And glowed in the night.

Herr Wöhler, Friedrich
He told his friend Liebig:
'Not now, sorry. See ya!
I’m pissing urea.’

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier,
Said : ‘Phlogiston theory is not okay,
This phlogiston theory is driving me mad,
I have to disprove it or I’ll lose my head.’

Robert H. Grubbs,
he visited pubs.
One pub let a bell ring,
That ring meant 'we're closing!'.

Ageing and poses in chemistry

2007-02-21T12:43:00.000+01:00

Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photo in 1826. Thanks to the work of people like him there are pictures of a lot of chemists from the old days.

A lot of pictures from the 19th and early 20th are potraits. It seems that some poses were quite popular and I wonder whether people stole each other's pose.

Some examples:
- ‘The old wise chemist in chair’-pose
- ‘The chemist in action with Bunsen-burner’-pose
- ‘The leaning head on hand thinking’-pose (still popular) Another great thing you can do nowadays is see how chemists aged. You can see how unhealthy chemistry was back then. Chemists of nearly 70 looked like 170. The chemists of a generation later had a better life. Linus Pauling for example did have the looks that corresponded to his age.

Lovely cancer research

2007-02-20T11:24:00.000+01:00

In Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2007, 6, 115 there is a paper to motivate everybody who is working on oncology. 'Why is cancer drug discovery so difficult?'

'Oncology has one of the poorest records for investigational drugs in clinical development, with success rates that are more than three times lower than for cardiovascular disease. The widespread, relentless and lethal nature of cancer persists, with only incremental overall improvements in treatment outcomes, despite billions of dollars of public and private investment. The few notable successes, such as imatinib (Gleevec; Novartis) in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), are, so far, exceptions.'

Somewhere else they state :'cancer models are notoriously problematic'

Should I be glad that I am not working in this field? Hmm, I do not care, I am used to failure. That is my job I think.

They have another wise remark: 'A good target is useless without a correspondingly good cognate drug.'

I would like to rephrase this to : 'I do not want your well validated target for which there is only a lousy biological assay.'

In most labs there is…

2007-02-20T10:01:00.000+01:00

- the bastard who only stops talking about his own fantastic project to remind you of your last failed one.

- the demi-water drinker.

- the nitwit who repeats all smart things others said an hour ago.

- the gutless character who always agrees with the boss, provided that he is around.

- the compulsive dry-ice in the waterbath of your rotavap thrower.

- the retard with a ‘try the microwave'-neurosis.

- the creep you suspect to have a pyridine fetish or something like that.

- someone like me who believes to be on the right place in such a mental institution.

Top 5 dead chemists

2007-02-19T11:10:00.000+01:00

1) Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882)
Wöhler is the only person in the top 5 list that never received a nobel prize. He died too soon for it. But this is the third time he is number one on a 'top 5 list' (see here and here).

Wöhler did the first total synthesis and proved that organic material could be synthesized from inorganic material. He published this in 1828 (Ueber künstliche Bildung des Harnstoffs; Ann. Phys. Chem. 1828, 88, 253).
'On the artificial formation of urea '

Where he tells us this.

'this study gave the unexpected result that combining cyanic acid with ammonia creates urea'

2) Robert Burns Woodward (1917-1979)

Number one on this list.

3) Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934)

The only woman that received two Nobel prizes, and ended as number one on this top 5 list. I said something about her here as well. Besides the Nobel prizes she was 'famous' for her affair, after her husband's death, with the married Paul Langevin. This caused a press scandal in 1911.

4) Hermann Emil Fischer (1852-1919)

The founding father of carbohydrate chemistry. His name is connected to a projection, indole- and oxazole synthesis and much more.

5) Linus Carl Pauling (1901-1994)

He was the only person to win two unshared Nobel prizes. Famous for his work on the nature of the chemical bond, crystal and protein structure determination, orthomolecular medicine and much more. He was a member of the emergency committee of atomic scientists founded by Einstein.

Well, the final score was (total 372 votes) :

(My own top 5 would have included Antoine Lavoisier, Marie Curie, Dmitri Mendeleev, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Friedrich Wöhler. I am happy with this result though.)

Top 10 greatest organic chemists of all time

2007-02-16T12:11:00.000+01:00

Paul republished his top 10 greatest organic chemists of all time post from his old blog. Woodward as number 1 (doing good here as well). He included living creatures as well.

top 5 dead chemists (score so far)

2007-02-16T09:09:00.000+01:00

Top 5 German/Austrian physicists in chemistry

2007-02-15T09:49:00.001+01:00

Many physicists made major contributions in the field of theoretical chemistry. Because of the abundance of such physicists I decided to restrict this list to German and Austrian physicists. The 5 physicists were ofcourse the pioneers of quantum mechanics and Nobel prize winners. The importance of their work for chemistry does not need an explanation.

1) Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961)

Famous because of the Schrödinger equation published in 1925: Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem; Annalen der Physik; 1926, 384, 4, 361 His papers contain impressive derivatives, integrals and differentials which confirm his image of a brilliant scientists who lives surrounded by unreadable formulas.

2) Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Heisenberg published the uncertainity priciple in 1927: Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik; Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei, 1927, 43, 172

The Heisenberg priciple triggered Albert Einstein to write a famous sentence to Max Born. During his career he collaborated with Niels Bohr, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli and the Nazis. The latter caused some damage on his reputation.

3) Max Born (1882-1970)

Born formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation. In 1926 Born received a letter from Albert Einstein about the Heisenberg uncertainity principle with the famous quote: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice." Born replied with the famous words: "Albert, stop telling God what He must do!"

4) Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

Famous for the Pauli-exclusion principle, published in 1925: Über den Zusammenhang des Abschlusses der Elektronengruppen im Atom mit der Komplexstruktur der Spektren; Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei, 1925, 31, 765. Spin theory was another achievement.

5) Erich Hückel (1896-1980)

Devoloped a method for molecular orbital calculations for π electron systems. In 1931 he published valence bond and molecular orbital formulation for benzene: Die Elektronenkonfiguration des Benzols und verwandter Verbindungen; Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei, 1931, 70, 204 . Remebered for the 4n+2 rule as well.

Top 5 dead chemists (final)

2007-02-15T09:05:00.000+01:00

I updated the Top 5 dead chemists poll, the votes from the qualification round will count for the final as well. You can vote again on your favourites (once a day). The poll shows the ranking from the qualification round. Very happy that Curie is number 1 now.