Austrian Chemical Works

The money came first. Sometime during 1903 or 1904, Haber got a letter from the Margulies brothers of Vienna, managers and part owners of the Austrian Chemical Works. The industrialists had detected intriguing traces of ammonia in their chemical... 

Table 1.1 Percentage of persons working in different branches of the Austrian chemical industry in 1902. Calculated from Tumpel (1995), 32.

Castner-Kellner process A process once used to produce chlorine and sodium hy-droxidebythe electrolysis of sodium chloride solution. The electrolysis took place in a cell with a mercury cathode and graphite anode. The cell consisted of three compartments with a common bed of mercury and solution of sodium chloride above. The cathode was in the central com partment and anodes in the other two. It was invented independently by American industrial chemist Hamilton Young Castner (1858-99), who was working in the UK at the time, and Austrian chemical engineer Karl Kellner (1851-1905). The process was abandoned due to concerns over mercury pollution and replaced by various diaphragm-based electrolytic processes. 

For the classification a typology is used, which has been worked out in a project of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management (BMLFUW) and is published in the book Chemical Leasing". 

They convinced the Austrian government to send them one ton of pitchblende from the mines at Joachimsthal. After receiving this 5-cubic-foot pile of "sand" from Austria, the Curies worked to chemically digest the ore. In this process they worked with batches as large... 

The Association of Austrian Chemists was founded at a time when the number of chemical companies, in which all sorts of chemicals were made, grew rapidly, with the consequence that more and more chemists were required to work in the industry. The industrial production shows clearly that this growth started around 1890 (Table 1.5). ... 

Chemistry teachers and managers of chemical processing plants were considered professional chemists. In most cases, they were graduates of medical, pharmaceutical, natural sciences and technical studies however, Polish chemists -working both in the territory of the former Poland and in exile - were perceived in accordance with their formal citizenship as Austrian, German and Russian scholars. 

The author is very much indebted to the Austrian fund for the promotion of scientific research (Fonds zur Fbrderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Wien) for the support of this work in the course of a national research program on molded plastic articles, project S 3302, and to Mrs. E. Ratajski for offering Fig. 5 from her still unpublished work. He also wishes to express his thanks to Prof. G. Astarita for inviting him to contribute to the meeting on 100 Years of Academic Chemical Engineering . 

In 1888, the Austrian botanical physiologist Reinitzer (1888), while working at the German University of Prague, extracted cholesterol from carrots in order to establish its chemical formula. Reinitzer examined the physico-chemical properties of various derivatives of cholesterol. A number of workers previously observed some distinct color effects on cooling cholesterol derivatives just above the solidification temperature. Reinitzer himself found the same phenomenon in cholesteryl benzoate. However, the colors, near the solidification of cholesteryl benzoate were not the most peculiar feature and he finally detected that cholesteryl benzoate, does not melt like other compounds, as it indicated two melting points. At 145.5 °C, it melted into a cloudy liquid and at 178.5 °C, it melted again and the cloudy liquid suddenly became clear. Furthermore, the phenomenon was reversible. 

In 1923, Walter Heitler and Fitz London fully explained electron-pair formation and chemical bonding in terms of quantum mechanics (Heitler and London, 1927). In the same year the French physicist Louise de Broglie proposed that wave-particle duality applied not only to photons, but also to electrons and every other subatomic physical system this work was published in his PhD thesis in 1924. Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1925) observed that the shell-like structure of the atom could be explained by a set of four parameters that define every quantum energy state, as long as each state was inhabited by no more than a single electron. 

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