Centenary of Schorlemmer (1834–92)

Abstract

CAUL SCHOKLEMMER, the German chemist to whose memory a laboratory was erected in Manchester in 1895, was born at Darmstadt on September 30, 1834. The son of a master carpenter, he began life as an apothecary, but while an assistant in Heidelberg he was able to attend the lectures of Bunsen, and at the age of twenty-five years abandoned a business career and entered the University of Giessen, where he studied under Heinrich Will (1812-90) and Hermann Kopp (1817-92). Coming to England, he followed Wilhelm Dittmar (1833-92) as private assistant to Roscoe at Owens College, and from 1861 until 1874 was official laboratory assistant. In this situation, he began original researches in hydro carbons, investigated the aqtion of chlorine on the paraffins and described a valuable general method for the conversion of secondary into the corresponding primary alcohols. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1871. In 1873, he was appointed lecturer in Owens College and the following year professor of organic chemistry, the chair being the first created for this subject in England. This chair he held until his death at Manchester on June 27, 1892, having by his labours assisted Roscoe to raise the Owens College school of chemistry to the first rank. He became a naturalised British subject in 1879, but was never married. His publications have a permanent place in chemical history. In 1867 he translated Roscoe's “Elementary Chemistry” into German, and in 1871 published a manual of organic chemistry. With Roscoe, in 1877, he published the first volume of their well-known “Systematic Treatise in Chemistry”. Like his countryman Kopp, Schor lemmer was much interested in the history of science, and from 1883 onwards this absorbed a great part of his time. An appreciation of him by Sir Henry Roscoe appeared in NATURE of August 25, 1892, and three years later we recorded the opening of the Schor lemmer memorial laboratory which had been erected at a cost of nearly £5,000.