Alfred Werner

Alfred Werner ( born December 12, 1866 in Mulhouse ( Alsace ), † November 15, 1919 in Zurich ) was a Swiss chemist.

Life and work

Werner, since 1895, Swiss citizen, was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Chemistry " due to his work on the bonding of the atoms in the molecule, which he has cleared and opened up new fields of research earlier, particularly in the field of inorganic chemistry."

He received in 1913 as the first inorganic chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and was until 1973, the last in this subject area.

He was born in 1866 in Alsace, Mulhouse and was interested in already as a student of chemistry. During his military service in Karlsruhe, he attended lectures on chemistry at the Technische Hochschule. Partly due to its typical of many Alsatian skeptical attitude towards the new Prussian order, he decided to continue his studies of chemistry in Switzerland. He enrolled in the winter semester 1886/87 at the Federal Polytechnic (later ETH) in Zurich and graduated in 1889 in Chemical Engineering. His doctoral thesis in the field of organic chemistry he made under the guidance of Arthur Hantzsch, before he went to a semester-long research visit to Bethelot at the Collège de France in Paris. After his return to Zurich, he habilitated at the Polytechnic, and then held in the summer semester 1892 up to and including the summer semester of the following year as a lecturer on specific chapters of chemistry.

Werner has excelled particularly in the study of coordination compounds. In 1892 he published in the Journal of Inorganic Chemistry an article about "Contributions to the constitution of inorganic compounds ". That he put the chain theory of the chemist Sophus Mads Jørgensen with the right knowledge to the interpretation of the experimental findings entirely new ideas about the bonding of complex compounds counter and sat down by it. This is considered the beginning of complex chemistry. A remarkable aspect of the work of 1892 was the lack of an adequate empirical basis for far-reaching theories (he himself had up to the time not performed a single experiment in this field ). This circumstance prompted later a German colleague to call Werner's coordination theory as an " ingenious impudence ".

Works

• Textbook of stereochemistry: with 116 illustrations in the text. - Jena. Fischer, 1904 Digitized edition of the University and State Library Dusseldorf