Wilhelm Ostwald

Categories: Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners | 1853 births | 1932 deaths | German scientists

Image:Wilhelm ostwald.jpg
Wilhelm Ostwald

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (commonly just Wilhelm Ostwald) (September 2, 1853 - April 4, 1932) was a German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities.

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Biography

He was born in Riga (at that time Russia, today Latvia), as the son of master-cooper Gottfried Wilhelm Ostwald and Elisabeth Leuckel. He was ethnically a Baltic German. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1875, then taught at Tartu from 1875 to 1881 and Riga Polytechnicum from 1881 to 1887. In 1887, he moved to Leipzig where he worked for the rest of his life.

He is usually credited with inventing the Ostwald process (patent 1902), used in the manufacture of nitric acid, although the basic chemistry had been patented some 64 years earlier by Kuhlmann, when it was probably of only academic interest due to the lack of a significant source of ammonia. That may have still been the state of affairs in 1902, although things were due to change dramatically in the second half of the decade as a result of Haber and Bosch's work on their nitrogen fixing process (completed by 1911 or 1913). The date 1908 (six years after the patent) is often given for the invention of the Ostwald process, and it may be that these developments motivated him to do additional work to commercialize the process in that time-frame. Alternatively, six years might simply have been the bureaucratic interval between filing the patent and the time it was granted.

The combination of these two breakthroughs soon led to more economical and larger-scale production of fertilizers and explosives which Germany was to find itself in desperate need of during World War I. Ostwald also did significant work on dilution theory leading to his discovery of the law of dilution which is named after him.

The word mole, according to Gorin, was introduced into chemistry around 1900 by Ostwald. Ostwald defined one mole as the molecular weight of a substance in mass grams. The concept was linked to the ideal gas, according to Ostwald. Ironically, Ostwald's development of the mole concept was directly related to his philosophical opposition to the atomic theory, against which he (along with Ernst Mach) was one of the last holdouts. He explained in a conversation with Arnold Sommerfeld that he was converted by Einstein's explanation of Brownian Motion.

Ostwald was a member of the International Committee on Atomic Weights. Due to World War I this membership ended in 1917 and was not resumed after the war. The 1917 Annual report of the committee ended with the unusual note: "Because of the European war the Committee has had much difficulty in the way of correspondence. The German member, Professor Ostwald, has not been heard from in connection with this report. Possibly the censorship of letters, either in Germany or en route, has led to a miscarriage".

In addition to his work in chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald was very productive in an extremely broad range of fields. His published work, which includes numerous philosophical writings, contains about forty thousand pages.

At the end of his extremely prolific life, Ostwald died in a hospital in Leipzig on April 4 1932.

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Publications

  • Ostwald, W., "Grundriss der allgemeinen Chemie". Leipzig, Engelmann, 1900.
  • Ostwald, W., "Grundriss der allgemeinen Chemie". 5th ed. Dresden, Steinkopff, 1917.
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External links and references

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