Otto Redlich

Otto Redlich (* November 4, 1896 in Vienna, † August 14, 1978 in California ) was an Austrian physical chemist and chemical engineer. He was involved among other things, the development of the equation of state of Redlich - Kwong.

Life

Redlich was born in 1896 in Vienna. He went to Vienna in the district Dobling to school. After graduation in 1915 he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army and served in World War I as an artillery officer mainly on the Italian front. He was wounded in August 1918 and came into captivity. Only in the year 1919 he returned to Vienna. He studied chemistry and received his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on the balance of nitric acid, nitrous acid and nitric oxide. Redlich worked for a year in industry and then came to Emil Abel at the University of Vienna. He became a lecturer in 1929 and professor in 1937. During this time he has developed the Teller- Redlich - isotope product rule. After Austria by the so-called connection was in March 1938 to a part of Nazi Germany, all government employed Jews lost in the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws their jobs, including scientists. Like many other scientists tried to leave Redlich, Austria.

With the help of foreign scientists, he was able to emigrate to the United States in December 1938. He has lectured at several universities and met Gilbert N. Lewis and Linus Pauling. Harold Urey helped him get a position at Washington State University. In 1945, he left college and started in the industry working at Shell Development Co. in Emeryville, California. He published his work on the improvement of the ideal gas equation in 1949, Redlich - Kwong today as the equation of state is known.

In 1962, Redlich Shell left and got a job at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1978, he died in California.

Writings

• Gilbert Newton Lewis and Merle Randall: Thermodynamics and the free energy of chemical substances. Translated and provided with additions and notes by Otto Redlich. J. Springer, Vienna, 1927.