The Romance of Chemistry

Robert W. Rosner. Chemie in Österreich 1740–1914: Lehre—Forschung—Industrie [Chemistry in Austria 1740–1940: Teaching—Research—Industry]. Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftsforschung. Vienna: Böhlau, 2004. 352 pp. €49.

Reviewed by Theodor Benfey

Zdenko Skraup. Encountering that name in Chemie in Österreich rang a bell. I vividly recalled my fascination in 1943 when, as my university course in organic chemistry reached the heterocycles, we learned that from the two simple chemicals aniline and glycerol Skraup had made the bicyclic heterocycle quinoline, a key building block of quinine, in a one-step reaction. I now learned that Skraup did this work in Graz, and that a colleague of his, Fritz Pregl, a 1923 Nobel laureate for his development of microanalytical methods, spent three years as a professor at Innsbruck before returning to Graz.

Graz and Innsbruck as centers of chemistry? I’d only known them as romantic places for vacations. Obviously my awareness of Austrian chemistry was totally inadequate.

Rosner’s pioneering book did much to set it straight. He begins in the time of Empress Maria Theresa, who, in order to have the best medical knowledge available to the royal family, summoned Gerhard van Swieten from Leiden in 1745. Van Swieten had studied under the famous Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave and was thus acquainted with the latest chemical findings. He transformed the teaching of medicine and chemistry in Vienna and elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was an opportune time, for chemical knowledge was needed in the empire’s developing mineralogy and mining centers. In 1768 Maria Theresa brought Jan Ingenhousz from Holland to be her children’s personal physician. He demonstrated the role of light and of constituents of air in plant growth at a time when many believed that nutrients came only from the soil. He also brought variolation, a method of smallpox inoculation, to Austria.

This first section of the book ends with the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in March 1848. The next section covers the period from the revolutions and their quick suppression to Austria’s defeat by Prussia and Italy in 1867. The final chapters take us to the beginning of World War I and the end of the monarchy. Each section treats educational and research developments first, then chemical industry. In the last period we become acquainted with Auer von Welsbach, discoverer of the rare earth elements praseodymium and neodymium and also inventor of the Welsbach mantle and of the first successful electric light bulb with a metallic filament.

Rosner, who as a teenager in 1939 left Vienna for England, returned after the war to study chemistry. After 34 years as a industrial chemist, he retired and studied political science and history of science. His historical work includes participation in the 1995 symposium that celebrated the centennial of the death of the extraordinary chemist and physicist Josef Loschmidt. Loschmidt is well known for calculating the number of gas molecules per unit volume, and in German-speaking regions Avogadro’s number is known (and known more properly) as the Loschmidt number. Less well known, but discussed succinctly in Rosner’s book, is Loschmidt’s publication in 1861, when many chemists wondered whether knowledge of a substance’s reactions could give any insight into its molecular structure, of graphic representations of 368 organic molecules.Many of these molecular diagrams are reproduced as a background pattern on the dustcover of Chemie in Österreich.

This book is the result of meticulous research. It weaves together the social, political, economic, and cultural history of central Europe as these changing influences impinged on industrial development and educational and research practice. Those who can read German easily will enjoy the well-written style; they and others will find it a reliable source of information relating to chemistry and chemical industry in Austria and the surrounding region.