Justus, baron von Liebig

Justus, baron von Liebig (born May 12, 1803, Darmstadt, Hesse-Darmstadt [Germany]—died April 18, 1873, Munich, Bavaria) was a German chemist who made significant contributions to the analysis of organic compounds, the organization of laboratory-based chemistry education, and the application of chemistry to biology (biochemistry) and agriculture.

Training and early career

Liebig was the son of a pigment and chemical manufacturer whose shop contained a small laboratory. As a youth, Liebig borrowed chemistry books from the royal library in Darmstadt and followed their “recipes” in experiments he conducted in his father’s laboratory. At the age of 16, after studying pharmacy for six months under the tutelage of an apothecary at Heppenheim, he persuaded his father that he wanted to pursue chemistry, not the apothecary trade. In 1820 he began his study of chemistry with Karl Kastner at the Prussian University of Bonn, following Kastner to the University of Erlangen in Bavaria, where Liebig ultimately received his doctorate in 1822. His diligence and brilliance was noticed by the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and his ministers, who funded his further chemistry studies under Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac in Paris between 1822 and 1824. While in Paris, Liebig investigated the dangerous explosive silver fulminate, a salt of fulminic acid. Concurrently, the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler was analyzing cyanic acid. Liebig and Wöhler jointly realized that cyanic acid and fulminic acid represented two different compounds that had the same composition—that is, the same number and kind of atoms—but different chemical properties. This unexpected conclusion, which was later codified under the concept of isomerism by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, led to a lifelong friendship between Liebig and Wöhler and to a remarkable collaborative research partnership, frequently conducted via correspondence.

Liebig’s scientific work with fulminates, together with his fortunate meeting with the influential German naturalist and diplomat Alexander von Humboldt, who was always keen to patronize younger talent, led to Liebig’s appointment at the small University of Giessen in May 1824. As Liebig later observed in his fragmentary autobiography, “at a larger university, or in a larger place, my energies would have been divided and dissipated, and it would have been much more difficult, perhaps impossible, to reach the goal at which I aimed.”

Foundations of organic chemistry

Liebig succeeded in institutionalizing the independent teaching of chemistry, which hitherto in German universities had been taught as an adjunct to pharmacy for apothecaries and physicians. Furthermore, he expanded the realm of chemistry teaching by formalizing a standard of training based upon practical laboratory experience and by focusing attention upon the uncultivated field of organic chemistry. The key to his success proved to be an improvement in the method of organic analysis. Liebig burned an organic compound with copper oxide and identified the oxidation products (water vapour and carbon dioxide) by weighing them, directly after absorption, in a tube of calcium chloride and in a specially designed five-bulb apparatus containing caustic potash. This procedure, perfected in 1831, allowed the carbon content of organic compounds to be determined to a greater precision than previously known. Moreover, his technique was simple and quick, allowing chemists to run six or seven analyses per day as opposed to that number per week with older methods. The rapid progress of organic chemistry witnessed in the early 1830s suggests that Liebig’s technical breakthrough, rather than the abandonment of the belief that organic compounds might be under the control of “vital forces,” was the key factor in the emergence of biochemistry and clinical chemistry. The five-bulb potash apparatus he designed for carbon dioxide absorption rapidly became, and remains to this day, emblematic of organic chemistry.

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Liebig’s introduction of this new method of analysis led to a decade of intensive investigation of organic compounds, both by Liebig and by his students. Liebig himself published an average of 30 papers a year between 1830 and 1840. Several of these investigative reports became highly significant to further developments in the theory and practice of organic chemistry. Most noteworthy among these writings were his series of papers on the nitrogen content of bases, joint work with Wöhler on the benzoyl radical (1832) and on the degradation products of urea (1837), the discovery of chloral (trichloroethanal, 1832), the identification of the ethyl radical (1834), the preparation of acetaldehyde (ethanal, 1835), and the hydrogen theory of organic acids (1838). He also popularized, but did not invent, the Liebig condenser, still used in laboratory distillations.

Liebig’s analytical prowess, his reputation as a teacher, and the Hessian government’s subsidy of his laboratory created a large influx of students to Giessen in the 1830s. Indeed, so many students were drawn to Liebig that he had to expand his facilities and systematize his training procedures. A considerable number of his students, some 10 per semester, were foreigners. Maintaining a devoted following among foreign audiences helped firmly to establish Liebig’s emphasis on laboratory-based teaching and research in foreign countries and in other German states. For example, the Royal College of Chemistry founded in London in 1845, the Lawrence Scientific School established at Harvard University in 1847, and Hermann Kolbe’s large laboratory at Leipzig in Saxony in 1868 were all modeled upon Liebig’s program.

One of the major investigations that Liebig collaboratively pursued with Wöhler was an analysis of the oil of bitter almonds in 1832. After demonstrating that the oil could be oxidized to benzoic acid (benzenecarboxylic acid), the two chemists postulated that both substances, as well as a large number of derivatives, contained a common group, or “radical,” which they named “benzoyl.” This research, based upon Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius’s electrochemical and dualistic model of inorganic composition, proved to be a landmark in classifying organic compounds according to their constituent radicals.

The radical theory, together with a large accumulation of data from organic analysis experiments, provided Liebig and Wöhler sufficient background to begin to analyze the complex organic compounds in urine. Between 1837 and 1838 they identified, analyzed, and classified many of the constituents and degradation products of urine, including urea (carbamide), uric acid, allantoin, and uramil. Among their conclusions, uramil was reported to be produced by “innumerable metamorphoses” of uric acid—itself a degradation product, they conjectured, of flesh and blood. This magnificent investigation, which astonished British chemists when Liebig reported it to the British Association for the Advancement of Science during a visit to Britain in 1837, gave contemporary physicians new insight into the pathology of many kidney and urinary bladder diseases. Later, in 1852, Liebig provided physicians with simple chemical procedures whereby they could quantitatively determine the amount of urea in urine. In another work of practical use to physicians, he determined the oxygen content of the air by quantifying its adsorption in an alkaline solution of pyrogallol (benzene-1,2,3-triol).