Rosenstiehl, Daniel-Auguste

As early as October 1875 the Alsatian chemist Daniel-Auguste Rosenstiehl had started his own investigation on this subject. He reported his results on 27 October 1875 and 29 March 1876 to the Societe industrielle de Mulhouse, but could not establish a production process that brought all the chemicals together in solution, a necessary precondition for industrial manufacture. Caro probably knew of Rosenstiehl s work, although he never admitted it, and eventually succeeded in inventing a wet-process manufacturing procedure after extensive trials with several nitration methods and solvents. Ironically he filed a pli cachete for this reaction with the Societe industrielle de Mulhouse on 22 March 1876, shortly before Rosenstiehl published his second contribution on this subject in the journal of the society. 

It is not my intention here to write or rewrite the history of synthetic dyes in the latter half of the nineteenth century/ Numerous historians have already done so in such great detail that it is hard to think of anything new to say/ Likewise the special role played by Alsace in this history has been extremely well documented/ The aim of this article therefore is a fairly modest one. The person we examined in 1994 for the purpose of compiling a biographical dictionary is in fact very little known.While Daniel August Rosenstiehl sometimes received credit as the chemist who solved the mystery of what we now call toluidine... 

That I write in some detail on Alsace is mainly because Daniel Auguste Rosenstiehl was bom in Strasbourg in 1839, and the early part of his career (1865-1877) was spent in Mulhouse. It was also as an Alsatian that the Paris municipal authorities appointed him, in 1905, to the chair of tinctorial chemistry which they had recently created at the CNAM. Likewise, back in 1882, they had placed Paul Schiitzenberger - also a native of Strasbourg and professor at the Mulhouse school of chemistry - in charge of the EPCI in Paris. 

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