Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine

Do you like wine?

An alarming title of a paper by Harry Drake Gibbs (1872 – 1934). This is the guy from gibbs reagent (2,6-dichloroquinonechloroimide for a phenol test, Chem. Rev. 1927, 3, 291)
The arsenic in the wine came from arsenic-containing pesticides, clarifying agents, aniline-dyes and agents to clean the wine casks.

You may think: ‘I don’t care I prefer beer.’ Well don’t feel safe.

The Manchester 1900 arsenic brewage resulted in 6000 poisonings and 70 deaths. The arsenic came from glucose, so the beer did not comply with the Reinheitsgebot.

Invert sugar (hydrolyzed sucrose) can be added while brewing beer to speed up the fermentation. Invert sugar can be made by cooking normal sugar in the presence of an acid (resulting in fructose and glucose). The 1900 brewer used invert suger prepared by by this method using sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid was made from sulfur obtained by combution of sulfur containing ore (pyrite). Unfortunately this ore contained quite some arsenic. The sulfuric acid was polluted with this arsenic and in the end there was the arsenicated beer.

This type of beer is still not very popular, most homebrewers prefer decent stuff.

Arsenicated wine is not rare. It has been said that Napoleon died from arsenic poisoning on Saint Helena in 1821.

If this is true it does not mean that someone poisoned him deliberately. Maybe he just drank the wrong stuff.

Mother's milk chemistry

There is this very nice paper by Prof. Albert Ripley Leeds (prof of chemistry at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J. who died of gastric cancer in 1902)

He analyzed the ingredients of mother’s milk and relates that to age, nationality, hair color etc.

The style of writing is awesome.

Prof. Albert screwed things up, writes it down and publishes it. That’s something you don’t see a lot nowadays.

Apart from analyses Prof. Albert describes physical properties.

When you study mother’s milk you have to describe this property.

Can you imagine a German brunette giving a chemistry professor (probably with beard) a breast?

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred being nursed by someone else:

Here are some other details of the Polish lady.

Too bad, no exact measurements of her breasts.

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred a younger lady.

This amazing 19th century paper clearly shows how careful they were back then with collecting their data.

Nobel beards

It has been said several times on this blog how important a beard can be for a chemist.

Ψ*Ψ even suggested to include the tag beard on this blog. (Great idea!)

Anyway... The Nobel laureates in the 5 traditional disciplines of 2007 are known. I am quite dissapointed. Let's compare this year to the first Nobel Prize year.

1901

Wilhelm C. Röntgen (Physics), Emil A. von Behring (Physiology or Medicine), Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme (Literature)
Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy (Peace), Jacobus H. van't Hoff (Chemistry)

5 bearded laureates, 1 not bearded

A bummer that the beardless guy is a chemist, but 5 out of 6 is a good score.

2007

Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg (Physics), Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies (Physiology or Medicine)
Doris Lessing (Literature), IPCC and Al Gore (Peace), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry)

No beard at all!

How about the chemistry laureates? How bearded were they in history. (I mean that they must have a beard on the portrait on the official website.)

1901 was not very good but in 1902 there was Emil Fisher to show the world how it should be done.

A beard and a pince-nez!

A great shock when you count the amount of bearded chemistry Nobel laureates over the years.


149 laureates and only 13 were bearded (a lousy 8.7%).

1901-1925 : 9 bearded laureates. In 1995 Mario J. Molina was the first bearded laureate in 70 years.

There were 3 beards after Molina. The last hero was (sure) 'The Man' in 2005. Okay, not an imressive beard, but any visible facial hair on the chin is sufficient.

Let's hope that next year there is a prize for someone like Stoddart or Seeman.

Thomson and Anderson

Couldn't resist posting this...

I posted that picture of the old lab and a picture of the guy who set up that lab; Prof. Thomas Thomson. The picture was taken around 1864. Thomson died in 1852 and was succeeded by Thomas Anderson.

How about this beard? Quite impressive I'd say.

Old labs

Old photos of chemistry labs are awesome.

A lot of bottles and men working in suit without safety glasses.

University of California 1888

Crowded labs with wooden benches and no ventilation at all.

Kansas State Agricultural College (1899)

Even labs crowded with women.

1915 Oregon Agricultural College

Or just an old shed with the smell of dung still in it, but a perfect place to discover Radium.


This made me wonder; What is the oldest photo of a chemistry lab? This is the oldest I could find.

Glasgow University ca. 1864

The laboratory was set up by the legendary Thomas Thomson.


In 1811 Thomson set up one of the first chemistry labs in Brittain in Edinburgh. This lab in Glasgow was set up in 1831. This lab seems to be the safest. If you are just sitting there doing nothing, what can go wrong?

The piano chemist

So, who is this forgotten musician chemist?

As far as I know he was not able to play an instrument very well and was not singing opera in the evening. It is the man who is the probably only chemist who has a named musical instument.

Behold the Bechstein-Siemens-Nernst grand piano!


This piano was named after these guys

Carl Bechstein (with a moustache growing out of his nose), Werner von Siemens (nice 'only on the cheeks moustache') and the chemist Walther Nernst (with his perpetual pince-nez)

The Bechstein-Siemens-Nernst grand piano (or neo-Bechstein piano) was one of the first electric pianos. Invented by Nernst with the help of the Bechstein company for the piano and the Siemens company for elecrical parts.



The strings vibrate in a magnetic field which produces an electric current in the coil around the magnet.


A radio amplifier is used to produce an electronically modified sound which comes out of the speaker of a connected phonograph. The piano sounded like an electric guitar.

Nernst started to build single string models in the lab.


In 1930 Bechstein introduced the piano on the market and Nernst could fidget with the real thing.


It was not a big succes, but a named musical instrument is more unique than a named fractioning column or a named condensor.

Top 5 depressed and nervous breakdown chemists

There already was a Top 5 suicide chemists and we decided to exclude them for this list. It will not be a surprise that 3 of the 5 committed suicide and that one possibly did.

Top 5 depressed and nervous breakdown chemists

1) Wallace Hume Carothers (1896–1937)

Du Pont's brilliant polymer researcher was obsessed with the idea that is work was useless. He wasn't laughing much on photographs. With his friend and colleague Julian Hill they produced Nylon that went in production in 1939. According to Hill, Carothers could list all the famous chemists who had committed suicide. He added himself to that list in 1937 by ingesting cyanide. He used to carry a capsule of the poison on his watch chain.

2) Archibald Scott Couper (1831-1892)
Scott is credited with inventing the use of straight lines to indicate bonds and he developed the theory of chemical structure, namely that tetravalent carbon atoms can link together to form large molecules. He did this work simultaneously with Kekulé's work. In 1859 Couper had a nervous breakdown and entered a private mental institution. When he was released 3 month later he immediately suffered another breakdown. In 1862 he was released again from the institution. The 30 years thereafter his mother cared for him, he never published again.


3) Max Joseph von Pettenkofer (1818-1901)

The chemist and hygienist never seems happy on photos. He is a founder of epidemiology and is known for his research on the spread of cholera. When he wanted to prove his incorrect belief that cholera spread via the atmosphere rather than directly from person to person he made a soup made from the excrement of a dying cholera patient and took it for dinner. He became very ill but survived. At the end of his life suffered from depressions and he finally shot himself.

4) Viktor Meyer (1848–1897)
The discoverer of thiophene and inventor of the Victor Meyer apparatus studied under August Wilhelm von Hofmann, and later worked for Robert Bunsen. He was a hard working man. He became an overworked man suffering from nervous breakdowns. He continued to work and took sleeping pills that further damaged his nervous system. Like Carothers he committed suicide by taking cyanide.


5) Primo Michele Levi (1919–1987)
The chemist and writer said in later life that he suffered from depressions and at took anti-depressants. Concerns for his own health and the fear that he would not be able to write anymore, the care for his old and senile mother and mother in law and his memories as a holocaust survivor were probably some of the causes of his depressions. In 1987 he fell from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor. Possibly suicide.

Alexander and Adolf

I recently bought the opera Prince Igor.Composed by the #2 of the Top 5 musician chemists : Alexander Borodin (1833-1887).

As Jordan commented on the top 5-post, Borodin was both famous as a composer and as a chemist.

Borodin was a member of The Five (or 'The Mighty Handful') a musical partnership of Russian composers who met in St Petersburg between 1856-1870. The aim was to create a new style of Russian music.

Here is Borodin on a photograph with 'The Mighty Five', not the most insignificant composers.

The Mighty Five" (l to r) Modest Moessorgski, Nikolaj Rimski-Korsakov, Vladimir Stasov, Mili Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin

Six people on the mighty five picture? Well, Stasov was not a real member of the group. Stasov acted as a kind of advisor.

Here is Borodin on a photograph with another chemist, not the most insignificant chemist.

Borodin, Dmitri Mendeev (1860 during a holiday in Italy.)

So there I was, listening to Prince Igor, discovering that Borodin had quite some friends who were (or became) quite famous. A few days after I bought Prince Igor I saw Borodin's name in a newspaper report.

Lew Besymenski, a Soviet intelligence officer who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, found a record collection in Hitler's chancellery in May 1945 when he was ordered to make a search shortly after Berlin fell to the Red army. Mr Besymenski did not mention the collection in his lifetime, because he was worried he might be accused of looting.

After Besymenski's death this summer the collection came in broad daylight. Besides the obvious contents, works of Wagner Beethoven and Bruckner, the collection contained record of Jewish and Russian composers/musicians, including records of Alexander Borodin.

Hitler may have had a taste for good music (Hmm, can't imagine that Hitler had a good taste for anything.), but I don't think he knew something about chemistry.

Tongue mystery

Still there is the question: Is it Ehrenfest or Debye? here on the 1927 Solvay conference video made by Irving Langmuir.
Comparing moustaches can give a clue. As Ashutosh said : Debye had a more Charlie Chaplin-like moustache. You can see this clearly on the famous group picture of the conference.

Here is Ehrenfest, from the same picture.
The 2 minutes video Ehrenfest contains several shots of Ehrenfest. Debye is there two or three times, just a brief moment.

Here he is with the Charlie Chaplin moustache again. In this frame his face seems to be a bit narrower.

It makes you wonder: was he was separated at birth from John Cleese.Debye isn't doing a silly walk though.

Here is Ehrenfest with Debye laughing in the background.His head appears to be polymorphous. When laughing his moustache appears to go from the Chaplin conformation into a broad moustache.I tend to believe that the tongue guy is Ehrenfest. Look at the last frame.
And compare it with this shot of Ehrenfest laughing at the camera.
Yeah, it must be Ehrenfest.... Ehhh... When I see the first frame of the 'stick out tongue'-sequence and look at this picture of Debye I'm in doubt again

The tongue guy is just a Ehrenfest-Debye blend separated at birth from John Cleese.

Liebig gallery

We received an email yesterday. It was Justus, complaining that his friend had a gallery on this blog and he did not. We had to promise to honour him as well, otherwise he would haunt us for the rest of our pathetic lives.

So here it is.