August Kekulé

Abstract

BY the death of this eminent chemist at the age of sixty-six, which took place on July 13, science loses one of her most distinguished votaries. It is only four years ago since a remarkable demonstration was held in Bonn in celebration of the twenty-fifth year of Kekulé's professorship in that University. Two years previously, in March 1890, a similar rejoicing had been held in Berlin in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the benzene theory by its illus trious author. It appears that Kekulé was intended by his father to have been an architect, and for that purpose he was sent to Giessen to become proficient in the subject after having undergone a preliminary training of the ordinary kind at the Darmstadt Gymnasium. At Giessen he came under the powerful spell of Liebig, and having attended some lectures on chemistry by that great master, his inclination towards the adoption of this science as a profession instead of architecture appears to have received a strong impulse. After a short period of probation at the Darmstadt Polytechnicum, where he tells us he learnt chemistry under Moldenhauer, and spent his leisure in latheturning and modelling in plaster, he returned to Giessen and entered as a student under Liebig and Will. Even at this stage of his career he appears to have been capable of rendering material assistance to his master in the experimental work being carried on in connection with the familiar “Letters on Chemistry,” in which Liebig includes the name of Kekulé among those of many other chemists now well known in science, in acknowledgment of the services rendered by the future founder of structural organic chemistry. That Liebig thought highly of his pupil may be inferred from the circumstance that he very nearly received the appointment of assistant in the Giessen laboratory, then renowned throughout Europe for the chemical work being carried on there. Instead of remaining at Giessen, however, young Kekulé went to Paris, and having sat at the feet of Regnault, Frémy and Wurtz, he was casually attracted by a course of lectures on chemical philosophy advertised by Gerhardt, who had resigned his professorship at Montpellier, and was giving private courses of instruction in the French capital. Gerhardt appears also to have recognised the capabilities of his student, and an intimate personal friendship sprang up between them. It is probable that this contact with Gerhardt acted as a stimulus in developing the particular faculty as a theoriser which must have been inherent in Kekulé, and which found expression in all his later work. From Paris, where he declined as invitation to become Gerhardt's assistant, he went for a short time to Switzerland as assistant to Von Plantu in the Castle of Reichenau. After this Swiss sojourn, and chiefly at the instigation of Bunsen, he accepted an offer from the late Dr. Stenhouse, then at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and for a time this country had the honour of fostering young Kekulé The bent of his mind in the direction of chemical theory is well brought out by his confession in later life that he did not derive much profit from his experience at St. Bartholomew's; but having become acquainted with Williamson, who had just completed his classical work on etherification, he appears to have found a more congenial outlet for his energies in the school of thought being evolved by that investigator and Odling, and which he declared, in 1892, to have been an excellent school “for the encouragement of independent thought.” While in this country an offer was made to Kekulé that he should remain here as a technologist, but the Fatherland had greater attractions for him; his great ambition was to become attached to a German University, and he started a small laboratory in the house of a corn merchant in the main street of Heidelberg, where he received pupils. In these days of palatial laboratories, it is interesting to recall that in this little kitchen Kekulé carried out his work on the fulminates, and that Baeyer, then one of his pupils, conducted his researches on cacodyl. It is not the laboratory that makes the chemist !