Prior, Fritz

Prior to World War I the principal sources of nitrogen compounds were some nitrate deposits in Chile. Fritz Haber, a German chemist, successfully developed the process we have just described, thus allowing chemists to use the almost unlimited supply of nitrogen in the atmosphere as a source of nitrogen compounds. 

What I hope to have added to the discussion has been a philosophical reflection on the nature of the concept of element and in particular an emphasis on elements in the sense of basic substances rather than just simple substances. The view of elements as basic substances, is one with a long history. The term is due to Fritz Paneth, the prominent twentieth century radio-chemist. This sense of the term element refers to the underlying reality that supports element-hood or is prior to the more familiar sense of an element as a simple substance. Elements as basic substances are said to have no properties as such although they act as the bearers of properties. I suppose one can think of it as a substratum for the elements. Moreover, as Paneth and before him Mendeleev among others stressed, it is elements as basic substances rather than as simple substances that are summarized by the periodic table of the elements. This notion can easily be appreciated when it is realized that carbon, for example, occurs in three main allotropes of diamond, graphite and buckminsterfullenes. But the element carbon, which takes its place in the periodic system, is none of these three simple substances but the more abstract concept of carbon as a basic substance. 

The history of thin-layer chromatography has been the subject of a book.158 The first separations on thin layers were performed in 1938. A gas was first used as the mobile phase in adsorption chromatography by Erica Cremer in Innsbruck in 1946. Using hydrogen as carrier gas, she and her student, Fritz Prior, successfully separated air and carbon dioxide using charcoal as the adsorbent. A newly-opened branch of the Deutches Museum in Bonn, devoted to post 1945 developments, has a display featuring the work of Cremer and Prior, with a model of their original apparatus.159... 

I am much indebted to Laurence Barron, Brian Coppola, Fran ois Diederich, and Fritz Vogtle for helpful correspondence. Special thanks are due to Jaroslav Jonas for a stimulating exchange of ideas and for providing a translation of his article Chvala Chirality (In Praise of Chirality)159 prior to publication. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

Fig. 9.7 Isotopic composition of groundwaters of northern Chile. The values lie below the meteoric line of local precipitation, explained by the investigators (Fritz, et al., 1979) as reflecting secondary fractionation by evaporation prior to infiltration, or the presence of ancient waters that originated in a different climatic regime. The large variations in the groundwater compositions are useful in local groundwater tracing.

The authors are grateful to J. George Radziszewski and Kristine B. Andersen for communication of spectra prior to publication, to Gdbor Keresztury for providing the phenol spectra in Figures 5 and 7 and to Hans Fritz for providing data on rubazoic acids. 

Gil-Parrado, S., Eernandez-Montalva A., Assfalg-Machleidt, I., Popp, O., Bestvater, F, Hol-loschi. A., Tobias, A., Knoch, T.A., Auerswald, E.A., Welsh, K., Reed, J.C., Fritz, H., Fuentes-Prior, P., Spiess, E., Salvesen, G.S., and Machleidt, W., 2002. lonomycin-acti-vated calpain triggers apoptosis, 7. Biol. Chem., 277, pp. 27217-27226. 

DIX, K and FRITZ, J (1987) Simple steam distillation for samples preparation prior to GC determination of organic compounds. J Chromotgr 408,201-210. 

The discovery of a parameter (olive oil/water partition coefficient) upon which a mechanistic interpretation for narcosis could be based was made independently six years later by Charles Ernest Overton at the University of Zurich (30-31) and by Hans Horst Meyer (32) and his collaborator Fritz Baum (33) at the University of Marburg. Prior to this discovery, Walter Dunzelt, a student of Meyer, attempted to confirm the Houdaille data on the relationship between water solubility and minimum toxic concentration, using tadpoles and small fish (34). 

Prior to World War I, Fritz Haber (1868-1934) invented the first major process for the fixation of nitrogen. In this process, nitrogen and hydrogen are reacted together in the presence of a catalyst at moderately high temperature and pressure to produce ammonia ... 

---