Hermann Blau

Hermann Blue ( born January 21, 1871 in Graben near Karlsruhe, † February 18, 1944 in Stephan near Rosenheim ) was a German engineer and chemist and inventor of the blue gas which was initially used as illuminating gas, and later in the airship.

Life

Blue, a student of the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Adolf von Baeyer, was originally a pharmacist, but later devoted himself entirely to the chemistry. His attempts to separate gas mixtures by physical means eventually led to the great invention of his life, for producing a liquid and shippable illuminating gas from distillation gases. The manufacturer Ludwig August Riedinger it was that prompted the inventor, his first production plant, afterwards the well-known blue gas factory to build in 1903 in Augsburg at the Straße.

From the Augsburg-based company, operating the blue together with Kommerzialrat Riedinger, later did the German blue gas company set up factories in Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, St Petersburg, brought to life in the United States, Canada and Cuba. The blue gas, rather than a blue, but rather has a water-white color and was only named after its inventor, so came in steel cylinders for shipment and had the advantage that it possessed the highest calorific value of any technically producible gas species. Unlike coal gas, it is free of carbon monoxide and therefore non-toxic. Its main use is found for lighting purposes, especially wherever coal gas was not available. In Denmark and Holland 's blue gas factories were built for operation of the beacon.

However, when the electric light is always to gain wider and finally came up the propane gas produced as a by -product of gasoline production, its preparation and use its shipping was much cheaper and easier, the blue gas became more and more out of the market. One consequence of this decline was that in the fall of 1933 shut down the blue gas factory in Augsburg and the main operation of the business was moved to a city in northern Germany.

One almost unexpected upturn experienced the blue gas production again, as attempts to operate the engines of the Zeppelin airships with blue gas, proved to be very beneficial. The main reason was the fact that the density of blue gas from the air is not much different and the entrainment of large amounts of this substance operating the airship not burdened unnecessarily. Replacing the produced during consumption of the gas void space in the tanks by the ambient air was simple and did not change the buoyancy of the airship. This preference became clear to light at the first America flight of the Zeppelin airship. The inventor experienced so once again a new use of blue gas. From 1929 generated from the Zeppelinbau Friedrichshafen the blue gas required in a furnished from the Augsburg plant manufacturing facility itself, the setting of the air vessel traffic also this use of the blue gas has an end.

Hermann Blue was married to Caroline Blue, had a daughter, Martha, and four sons Hermann, Rudolf, Edmund and Theodore.

• Engineer
• Chemists ( 20th century)
• Inventor
• German
• Born in 1871
• Died in 1944
• Man