Meyer, Adolf

Meyer was a professor at the Forstakademie (Forestry School) in Eberswalde when he formulated his unpublished comprehensive table. The building where he worked is shown in Figure 8. (Eberswalde is in the northeast of Germany, northeast of Berlin, not far from the Polish border.) Meyer moved to the Karlsruhe Polytechnikum in 1868, and he left his table in Eberswalde with his successor, Adolf Remele. Carl Seubert, one of Remele s colleagues, published that table in 1895 after Meyer s death (72). 

Since Hoffmann was in Heideiberg for only one semester before graduating and taking a position in private industry, we can place this testimony in the summer of 1856. Besides Kekule and Hoffmann, the circle referred to included Erlenmeyer, Baeyer, Lothar Meyer, Ludwig Carius, the Swiss Hans Landolt, the Austrians Adolf Lieben and Leopold von Pebal, the German-Russian Friedrich Beilstein, the Russian Leon Shish-kov, the American Frank Storer, and the Italians Angelo Pavesi and Ag-ostino Frapolli (Frapolli, Pebal, and Erlenmeyer were all three to five years older than Kekule Lieben, Beilstein, and Baeyer, several years younger). 

Several articles discussed achievements of Austrian chemists, often in connection with obituaries or when a chemist was awarded the Lieben Prize. One of the obituaries was for the chemist Adolf Lieben, who had initiated the Ignaz Lieben Preis in 1863 from money inherited from his father Ignaz Lieben. It was at that time a completely new idea to award a prize for excellence in science. The Lieben Foundation was controlled by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. OCHZ always reported on the sessions of the mathematical-scientific class of the academy and also on the winners of the Lieben Prize. For example OCHZ reported on the Lieben Prize for Rudolf Wegscheider, professor at the University of Vienna and president of VOCH since 1905, and Hans Meyer, professor at the University of Prague, who later died in the concentration camp Theresienstadt in 1942. Wegscheider had published papers on the esterification of various adds and Meyer about the use of thionyl chloride in organic synthesis. 

Ann.y 1859, cxi, 121 (prep, dichloroethyl ether) 1865, cxxxiii, 287 (with Bauer), act. of ZnEtg. Adolf Lieben (Vienna 3 December 1836-6 June 1914), professor in Palermo (1865), Turin (1867), Prague (1871) and Vienna (1875) Zeisel, Ber., 1916, xlix, 835-92 R. Meyer, (i), 175 ArcheioHy 1936, xviii, 188 (correspondence with Cannizzaro, Paternb, and Naquet). 

It appears that for some reason Lothar Meyer s 1868 table was not pubhshed. A fuU 25 years later, Adolf Remele, a German chemist who succeeded Lothar Meyer as professor of chemistry in Eberswalde, showed the table to Lothar Meyer, who in the meantime seemed to have forgotten aU about its existence. In 1895, after Lothar Meyer s death, Carl Seubert, one of his colleagues, finally pub-... 

The cases of Viktor Meyer and Max Bodenstein are also quite interesting. Viktor Meyer (1848-1897) did a doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg (1867) on a subject suggested and supervised by Adolf von Baeyer (1835-1917) who at that time was simply an assistant of Bunsen. The "official" supervisors of his thesis were the organic chemist Bunsen, the physicist Kirchhoff and the physical chemist Hermann Kopp (1817-1892). He is therefore linked to all four of them, although in terms of philosophy of research he remained a follower of von Baeyer. Max Bodenstein (1871-1942), often called the father of electrochemistry, did his doctoral work under Viktor Meyer at the University of Heidelberg (1894). For the next eleven years (1895-1906) he became the main assistant of Wilhelm Ostwald, ultimately converted to physical chemistry which he practiced when he became professor in the Universities of Hannover and Berlin. Here he is linked to both Meyer and Ostwald. 

In 1866 Meyer moved to Neustadt-Eberswalde, where he became professor at the Forestry Academy. It was there that he worked on anew edition of his book Moderne Theorien and, in 1868, constructed an extended arrangement with fifty-two elements in fifteen vertical rows, leaving the sixteenth row empty (Figure 3.1). This system was not published at that time. Meyer left the draft to his successor, geologist Adolf Remele (1839-1915). It is not clear why Kernels only returned the manuscript to Meyer in 1893, and not in the 1880s during the priority dispute. It is also unknown why Meyer did not ask Kernels for the draft. The system from 1868 was finally published in 1895. Seubert wrote of a system in the headline of his 1895 publication, but there is no evidence that Meyer used this term. 

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