Karol Olszewski

Karol Stanisław Olszewski ( born January 29, 1846 in Broniszów, † March 24, 1915 in Krakow, then Austria - Hungary, now Poland) was a Polish chemist, mathematician and physicist. Olszewski is known mainly because he succeeded in 1883, the first liquefaction of air along with Zygmunt Wroblewski.

The father was Olszewskis landowners and died a few months after the birth of Karol's in a peasant uprising. Karol Olszewski grew up as an orphan with relatives and attended school in Nowy Sacz ( Nowy Sacz ) and Tarnów. From 1866 Olszewski studied physics and chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 1872 he moved to the University of Heidelberg. There he received his doctorate in the same year, without a thesis submitted to what was possible at that time there. Then Olszewski returned to the Jagiellonian University, where he became an assistant to Emil Czyrnianski. There Olszewski 1873 habilitation, he became a lecturer and worked in the field of analytical and inorganic chemistry - first from 1876 as a non-scheduled, and from 1891 as a full professor ..

In Krakow began in 1882, the fruitful collaboration with Zygmunt Wroblewski, when he came to the Jagiellonian University. After both had previously been employed with the liquefaction of gases, they succeeded in 1883 as first liquefaction of oxygen and nitrogen from the air.

As Olszewski 1896 heard of the discovery of X-rays, he repeated the experiments Conrad Röntgen and made the first X-ray images in today's Poland.

Works

• About the liquefaction of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon monoxide, together with Zygmunt Wroblewski, in Annals of Physics and Chemistry, 1883