Von Baeyer, Adolf

THE 1905 NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY AWARDED TO ADOLF VON BAEYER — THE EARLIEST NOBEL PRIZE IN SCIENCE TO COME TO AUCTION AND THE FIRST NOBEL PRIZE EVER AWARDED TO A PERSON OF JEWISH DESCENT

PRAISE FOR BAEYER FROM HIS CONTEMPORARIES:

• "THE MOST EMINENT ORGANIC CHEMIST IN GERMANY DURING THE LATTER PART OF THE NINETEENTH AND THE EARLY PART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS ADOLF VON BAEYER." — FERDINAND HENRICH
• "IT IS QUESTIONABLE WHETHER ANY TEACHER OR INVESTIGATOR EVER EXERTED A GREATER INFLUENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE, AND ESPECIALLY OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY, THAN BAEYER HAS DONE." — W.H. PERKIN
• "BAEYER HAS WORKED IN ALL POSSIBLE FIELDS OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY. EVERYWHERE HIS WORK HAS BROKEN NEW GROUND. THERE IS SCARCELY ONE OF HIS INNUMERABLE PAPERS WHICH DOES NOT CONTAIN SOME ORIGINAL IDEA OR SOME NEW METHOD." — OSKAR WIDMAN

Born in Berlin on October 31, 1835 to parents Johann Jacob Baeyer and Eugenie Hitzig (of the prominent German-Jewish Itzig/Hitzig family), Baeyer displayed remarkable precociousness early in life: at the age of 12, he synthesized a previously unknown double carbonate of sodium and copper. As a chemistry student in Heidelberg, Baeyer worked with two of the preeminent chemists of the 19^th century: first in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen (the inventor of the Bunsen burner), and then with August Kekulé, who developed the modern theory of chemical structure. Based on work done in Kekulé's laboratory on arsenic methyl chloride, Baeyer received his doctorate in 1858 from the University of Berlin.

Not long after receiving his doctorate, Baeyer would begin to make a series of discoveries that brought him renown both within the chemical profession and with the wider public. In 1863-64, Baeyer discovered barbituric acid, the parent compound of the barbiturates which — although now largely replaced by newer drugs — were for over a century fundamental to medicine for their anesthetic, anxiolytic, and anticonvulsant properties. A year later, in 1865, Baeyer began his celebrated and decades-long work on indigo that would lead, in 1883, to the discovery of indigo's chemical formula and the creation of synthetic indigo, providing the foundation for the entire German dye industry. In 1871, during his research on pigments and dyes, Baeyer synthesized phenolphthalein, a compound known to every chemist and chemistry student as the pH indicator that turns pink in the presence of basic solutions. And, in 1907, Leo Baekeland would draw upon Baeyer's previous experiments with mixtures of phenol and formaldehyde — which Baeyer had dismissed as "Schmiere" — to create Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic and which inaugurated the "Plastics Age" of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

In 1885, on his 50^th birthday and in recognition of his scientific achievements and service to the German dye industry, Baeyer was elevated to the hereditary nobility by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, conferring upon him the "von" distinction. In the same decade, he received some of the most important scientific distinctions of the era: the Davy Medal of The Royal Society for the synthesis of indigo (1881), fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1884), membership to the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1884), and foreign membership to The Royal Society (1885). In 1903, Baeyer received the inaugural Liebig Medal from the German Chemical Society, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Justus von Liebig, one of the founders of modern organic chemistry. This was followed two years later, in 1905, with the awarding of this Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the crowning achievement and recognition of Baeyer's remarkable career, given to him "in recognition of his services in the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds."

Having made fundamental discoveries in medical, biological, and industrial chemistry, many of which were essential to the development of the entire field of modern organic chemistry, Adolf von Baeyer was recognized by his peers as one of the most important chemists of his generation and is forever memorialized today by his achievements and awards, including the 1905 Nobel Prize in Chemistry offered here. Additionally, as the first entry in Tina Levitan's pathbreaking book The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize (1960), Baeyer stands first in a long line of distinguished laureates of Jewish descent in every field of human achievement recognized by the Nobel Prize.

REFERENCES:

Gillespie, Charles C., editor in chief. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970-1980, 389-391.

Henrich, Ferdinand. "Adolf Von Baeyer (1835-1917)." Journ. Chem. Educ. 7, 1231-1248 (1930).

Levitan, Tina. The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960.

Perkin, W. "Prof. Adolf Von Baeyer, For.Mem.R.S." Nature 100, 188-190 (1917).