15 Facts About Hermann Kolbe

Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was a German chemist and academic, and a major contributor to the birth of modern organic chemistry.

Hermann Kolbe was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and won the Royal Society of London's Davy Medal in the year of his death.

Hermann Kolbe died of a heart attack in Leipzig at age 66, six years after the death of his wife, Charlotte.

Hermann Kolbe was born in Elliehausen, near Gottingen, Kingdom of Hanover as the eldest son of a Protestant pastor.

Hermann Kolbe obtained the leaving certificate six years later.

Hermann Kolbe had become passionate about the study of chemistry, matriculating at the University of Gottingen in the spring of 1838 in order to study with the famous chemist Friedrich Wohler.

Hermann Kolbe took his doctoral degree in 1843 at the same university.

In 1851, Hermann Kolbe succeeded Bunsen as professor of chemistry at Marburg and, in 1865, he was called to the Universitat Leipzig.

Hermann Kolbe was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1874.

Hermann Kolbe's wife died in 1876 after 23 years of happy marriage.

Hermann Kolbe promoted the idea that organic compounds could be derived from substances clearly sourced from outside this "organic" context, directly or indirectly, by substitution processes.

Hermann Kolbe introduced a modified idea of structural radicals, so contributing to the development of structural theory.

Hermann Kolbe was the first person to use the word synthesis in its present-day meaning, and contributed a number of new chemical reactions.

Besides his work for periodicals he wrote numerous books Hermann Kolbe served for more than a decade as what, in modern terms, would be understood the senior editor of the Journal fur Praktische Chemie, Hermann Kolbe was sometimes so severely critical of the work of others, especially after about 1874, that some wondered whether he might have been suffering a mental illness.

Hermann Kolbe was intolerant of what he regarded as loose speculation parading as theory, and sought through his writings to save his beloved science of chemistry from what he regarded as the scourge of modern structural theory.