Arthur Stoll, 1887-1971

Abstract

Arthur Stoll died peacefully on 13 January 1971, six days after the end of his 84th year. In him we lost a man who occupied an exceptional position in the Swiss chemical industry. But Stoll’s importance certainly did not lie solely in perfect performance of his professional duties; he also made unusually great contributions to widely varying fields of science and to cultural life in general. He was born on 8 January 1887, in the village Schinznach-Dorf in Aargau, where he went to the Volks- and Bezirksschule; his father was the Rector of the latter. In the autumn of 1906, having passed through the technical division of the Aarau Kantonschule where Albert Einstein preceded him by about 10 years, he entered the Polytechnikum in Zürich which a few years later was renamed, after the German pattern, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH). There he chose the science faculty, being interested especially in botany and geology. The study of these subjects included also attendance at the lectures on inorganic and organic chemistry that Richard Willstätter had been giving since 1905. Willstätter had previously been Associate (ausserordentlicher) Professor at the Chemical Institute of Munich University which was under the direction of the authoritarian and famous Professor Adolph von Baeyer. Willstätter’s influence on the young Stoll was so great that he decided on a study of chemistry, but he was able to select botany and geology as subsidiary subjects. Willstätter (1949) has written in his Memoirs that he got to know Stoll in the course of elemental analysis, where he won the trust and affection of his teacher who soon took Stoll into his private laboratory for work on his Diploma and on his Doctor thesis whose title read ‘Ueber Chlorophyllase und Chlorophyllide (5) In 1911 Stoll obtained his Dr.sc.nat.