Auer, Karl

Early in his life he left his children such a large inheritance that his son Karl was able to pursue his studies of chemistry in 1878 in Vienna with Professor lAjeSaen and in 1880 with Bunsen in Heidelberg without material worries. In the laboratory of Bunsen he was first introduced into the chemistry of the rare earth elements. Uhtil his death in 1929 he remained true to this field of work. The intensive involvement in spectroscopy with Bunsen also made him familiar with the problems of radiant li t v ch without doiibt was important for his later invention of Auer-Li t and with that the use of the rare earth elements. Further, he had an insight into the work of winning the rare earth metals from their salts through Bunsen, Hill rand and Norton A)o succeeded for the first time in 1875 to produce rare ecu h metals by electrolysis vhich later was further developed in Munich by Muthmann. Ihe concepts "pyrophor" and "pyrophoricity" originate from Auer von Welsbach. 

Geneva found a further earth in this substance, which Lecoq isolated in 1886 and called gadolinium. Didymium itself, meanwhile, was revealed as a phantom, a mixture of two new elements that Karl Auer in Austria discovered in 1885 and called neodymium ( new didymium ) and praseodymium ( green didymium ). Just how many of these earth elements were there, after all ... 

At nearly the same time, German chemist Karl Auer (Baron von Welsbach 1858—1929) made the same discovery. He suggested different names for the two new elements in ytterbium. He called them cassiopeium and aldebaranium, in honor of the constellation Cassiopeia and the bright star Aldebaran. Today, some German chemists still refer to lutetium as cassiopeium. 

Osmium is used as an alloying metal to make soft platinum and palladium hard. The metal is also used to tip gold pen points. It is technically very interesting that a platinum alloy with 25% osmium has very good creep properties at a temperature as high as 1600°C. Because of its high melting temperature Karl Auer used osmium for the first metal-filament lamp. 

Aragane, J., Urushibata, H. and Murahashi, T. Journal of Electrochemical Society, 141(7) 1804-1808, July 1994. Emmanuel Auer, Gerhard Heinz, Thomas Lehmann, Robert Schwarz and Karl-Anton Starz. Pt/Rh/Fe alloy catalyst for fuel cells and a process for producing the same. US Patent No. 6, 165, 635, December 26, 2000. 

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