Carl Schorlemmer FRS (30 September 1834 – 27 June 1892) was a German chemist who did research on hydrocarbons and contributed to the study of the history of chemistry.
Early life and education
Schorlemmer was born in 1834, the son of a
joiner in
Darmstadt. He was able to visit
Realschule and later — against the will of his poor father —
trade school. Schorlemmer started his training to become a pharmacist in 1853 in Groß-Umstadt. During his training he made own chemical experiments in the laboratory and was interested in
astronomy and
botany. After two and a half years he passed his exam, became an assistant pharmacist and worked in the Schwanen pharmacy in
Heidelberg. Having attended some lectures of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, he studied pharmacy and chemistry in
Heidelberg and in Gießen (where he attended lectures of
Heinrich Will and Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp, a historian of chemistry). He later became demonstrator at
Owens College in Manchester with Henry Enfield Roscoe and was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 13 December 1870
[
Complete List of the Members & Officers of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society, from its institution on February 28th, 1781, to April 28th, 1896.
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Professorship
From 1874 on, Schorlemmer was professor of organic chemistry in Manchester. Schorlemmer became a member of the
Royal Society in the UK in 1871.
[* - contains a list of Schorlemmer's publications] In 1878, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
Research topics and achievements
-
Developed a method to convert a secondary alcohol into a primary alcohol
-
Proved that "ethane" and "ethyl hydride" are identical
-
Research on paraffin hydrocarbons, the compounds aurin, rosaniline, suberone, and safranin, and topics in the history of chemistry.
Death
Towards the end of Schorlemmer's life, his health worsened. He died due to a lung disease at his house in Manchester on June 27, 1892. He was unmarried.
Connections with Marx and Engels
Schorlemmer was a friend of
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, who asked him for advice on scientific questions. Schorlemmer was one of the thirteen people at Marx's funeral.
His sociological analysis of the history of chemistry had a significant influence on Engels and Marx's views on the development of
Natural science.
At Schorlemmer's death, Engels published an obituary[*]
Writings
Schorlemmer wrote several books about organic chemistry, the most important one being
A Treatise on Chemistry (1874), which he co-authored with Henry Roscoe. Schorlemmer is considered to have made an essential contribution to the history of chemistry as an academic field in his later works, culminating in his book
The Rise and Development of Organic Chemistry.
Towards the end of his life, Schorlemmer began to write a book about the history of chemistry from antiquity to the 17th century. He died before finishing his work, so it was never published, the manuscript covers about 1,100 pages and is stored in John Rylands Library.
Selected writings
See also
Further reading
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Dr. O. Krätz: Chemie in unserer Zeit / 14/ Year: 1980 Nr. 3 A27
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J. R. Partington: A History of Chemistry; vol. 4. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964, pp. 774+775
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Rolf Gelius: "Carl Schorlemmer als Wissenschaftshistoriker: Zur Kenntnis seines unvollendeten Manuskripts, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chemie"/ intern.Zs.f.Gesch.u.Ethik der Naturwiss., Techn. u. Med.4/Birkhäuser Verlag 1996 /65-81
