Charles Adolphe Wurtz

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Adolphe Wurtz
Born(1817-11-26)26 November 1817
Wolfisheim, near Strasbourg, France
Died10 May 1884(1884-05-10) (aged 66)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Alma materUniversity of Strasbourg
Known forWurtz reaction
AwardsFaraday Lectureship Prize (1879)
Copley Medal (1881)
Scientific career
FieldsChemistry
Doctoral advisorAmédée Cailliot
Other academic advisorsJustus von Liebig
Doctoral studentsCharles Friedel
Armand Gautier
Other notable studentsJacobus Henricus van 't Hoff
Alexander Zaytsev

Charles Adolphe Wurtz (French: [vyʁts]; 26 November 1817 – 10 May 1884) was an Alsatian French chemist. He is best remembered for his decades-long advocacy for the atomic theory and for ideas about the structures of chemical compounds, against the skeptical opinions of chemists such as Marcellin Berthelot and Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville. He is well known by organic chemists for the Wurtz reaction, to form carbon-carbon bonds by reacting alkyl halides with sodium, and for his discoveries of ethylamine, ethylene glycol, and the aldol reaction. Wurtz was also an influential writer and educator.

Life

Adolphe Wurtz (he never used the name "Charles") was born in

Lutheran pastor in the nearby town of Wolfisheim
. His wife, Adolphe's mother, Sophie Kreiss, died in 1878.

When he left the

Jean Baptiste Dumas to Antoine Balard.[2] His employment with Balard lasted a few months, after which Wurtz began work in Dumas's private laboratory. In 1845, he became assistant to Dumas at the École de Médecine, and four years later began to give lectures on organic chemistry in his place.[1]

As there was no laboratory at his disposal at the Ecole de Médecine, he opened a private one in 1850 in the Rue Garanciere; but three years later the building was sold, and the laboratory had to be abandoned. In 1850, he received the professorship of chemistry at the new

Eugene Soubeiran). In 1866, Wurtz undertook the duties of dean of the faculty of medicine. In this position, he exerted himself to secure the rearrangement and reconstruction of the buildings devoted to scientific instruction, urging that in the provision of properly equipped teaching laboratories France was much behind Germany (see his report Les Hautes Etudes pratiques dans les universités allemandes, 1870).[1]

In 1875, resigning the office of dean but retaining the title of honorary dean, he became the first occupant of a new chair of organic chemistry at the Sorbonne, which the government had established due to his influence. However, he had great difficulty in obtaining an adequate laboratory.[1] The buildings of the new Sorbonne that ultimately provided modern scientific laboratories were not completed until 1894, ten years after his death.

Wurtz was an honorary member of almost every scientific society in Europe. He was the principal founder of the

72 names inscribed on the Eiffel tower.[citation needed
]

Wurtz died in Paris on 10 May 1884, probably of complications due to diabetes, and was buried in the north-east of the city at Père Lachaise Cemetery. [3]

Scientific and academic work

Influenced by such leading figures as Liebig and Dumas, by 1856 Wurtz became a powerful advocate of a reform in chemical theory then being led by

Jons Jacob Berzelius. Soon thereafter, Wurtz also adopted the new structural theory that was developing from the work of younger chemists such as August Kekulé
. However, a kind of skeptical positivism was influential in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, and Wurtz's efforts to gain a favorable hearing for atomism and structuralism in his homeland were largely frustrated.

Wurtz's first published paper was on

Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe resulted in the discovery of many new facts and in a better understanding of the relations between the oxy- and the amido-acids.[4] In 1855, he published work on what is now known as the Wurtz reaction
.

In 1867 Wurtz synthesized neurine by the action of trimethylamine on glycol-chlorhydrin. In 1872 he discovered the aldol reaction and characterized the product as showing the properties of both an alcohol and an aldehyde. Alexander Borodin discovered the reaction independently in the same year. The product was named an aldol, pointing out its double character.[5] This led to a second confrontation with Kolbe.

In addition to this list of some of the new substances he prepared, reference may be made to his work on abnormal vapor densities. While working on the olefins he noticed that a change takes place in the density of the vapor of amylene hydrochloride, hydrobromide, &c, as the temperature is increased, and in the gradual passage from a gas of approximately normal density to one of half-normal density he saw a powerful argument in favor of the view that abnormal vapor densities, such as are exhibited by sal-ammoniac or phosphorus pentachloride. are to be explained by dissociation. From 1865 onwards he treated this question in several papers, and in particular maintained the dissociation of vapor of chloral hydrate, in opposition to

Etienne Henri Sainte-Claire Deville and Marcellin Berthelot.[6]

For twenty-one years (1852–1872) Wurtz published in the

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
, rather than asserting exclusive French national ownership of the science.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e Chisholm 1911, p. 859.
  2. ^ Rocke, Alan (2001). Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 103–104.
  3. ^ Williamson, A. W. (1885). "Obituary of Charles Adolphe Wurtz". Proceedings of the Royal Society. 38: xxiii–xxxiv.
  4. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 859–860.
  5. Compt. Rend.
     74: 1361.
  6. ^ a b Chisholm 1911, p. 860.

Works

Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliqueée, 1869

References

Further reading

External links

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