Wilhelm Ostwald

German chemist

• Born: September 2, 1853
• Birthplace: Riga, Latvia
• Died: April 4, 1932
• Place of death: Grossbothen, near Leipzig, Germany

Ostwald’s most notable work was in the field of chemistry, in which he is considered to be the founder of physical chemistry and in which he was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize. He was later nominated for a second Nobel Prize, this time in physics, for his work in the field of color science.

Early Life

Wilhelm Ostwald (VIHL-hehlm OHST-vahlt), son of Gottfried Wilhelm and Elisabeth Leuckel Ostwald, was born in Riga, Latvia, and spent the first thirty-four years of his life there and in nearby Dorpat (now Tartu). At the realgymnasium at Riga, Ostwald required seven years to complete the curriculum normally finished in four. This delay can be attributed to the wide range of his interests, because during this period young Ostwald pursued studies in music, becoming proficient on both piano and viola; studied painting and handicrafts under the tutelage of his father; and set up a private laboratory in which he experimented in chemistry and physics, became an accomplished amateur photographer and film processor, and manufactured fireworks. The near disasters that accompanied the fireworks project taught him the need for more than a recipe and a desire. He knew he needed an understanding of what was occurring.

In 1872, following graduation from the realgymnasium, Ostwald left Riga to attend the University of Dorpat and studied chemistry under Carl Schmidt and Johann Lemberg and physics with Arthur von Öttingen. More focused on his pursuits, Ostwald finished this part of his chemical education in only three years. Thereafter, he took positions as an unpaid assistant, first to Öttingen and later to Schmidt. Ostwald credited these two men as the main influences on his chemistry. Ostwald also realized the need for a strong mathematical background and proceeded to teach himself from a textbook by Karl Snell. Ostwald later gave Snell credit both for his sound mathematics and for his direction into the field of philosophy. He was awarded the doctorate in chemistry by the University of Dorpat in 1878 with a dissertation whose subject was optical refraction as a way to assess chemical affinity. Ostwald stayed in Dorpat, assisting at the university and teaching at the realgymnasium.

In 1880, Ostwald married Helen von Reyher. Their marriage produced two daughters and three sons. His son, Karl Wilhelm Wolfgang, followed in his father’s footsteps and was a prominent chemist, and one of his daughters, Grete, published an Ostwald biography, Wilhelm Ostwald: Mein Vater (1953; Wilhelm Ostwald, my father). In 1881, Ostwald returned to Riga as professor of chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute. While holding this position, Ostwald began making scientific contributions that brought him to the attention of the world’s chemists.

Life’s Work

The branch of chemistry known as physical chemistry originated in a series of lectures on chemical affinity that Ostwald presented at the University of Dorpat in 1876. Notes from that series were expanded by research and reading and published as Ostwald’s first book, Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Chemie (1885-1887; textbook of general chemistry), which presented a new organization of chemistry.

In 1881, Ostwald accepted the professorship of chemistry at the Riga Polytechnicum. At Riga, Ostwald became interested in Svante August Arrhenius’s ionic dissociation theory, and in 1886 Arrhenius accepted an invitation to work with Ostwald. The two worked closely, but on different problems, for years. Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff’s publications on chemical dynamics were also noted by Ostwald. It was the importance of these new concepts of Arrhenius and of van’t Hoff that Ostwald recognized and promoted in his writing. The controversy generated by Ostwald’s “new chemistry” brought him wide recognition and the appointment as professor of physical chemistry at the University of Leipzig in 1887.

Ostwald organized the Department of Physical Chemistry and spent the years until 1906 strengthening it. The department was at its prime in 1899, and it was common to have forty students from around the world in Ostwald’s laboratory. Research on such a large scale required special methods, and those developed by Ostwald are still seen in university research groups. Mature scientists acted as assistants to Ostwald and as liaison officers between Ostwald and the students. Each problem to be studied was chosen by consultation between Ostwald and the student. There were weekly seminars to present and discuss research progress. This way Ostwald exerted his influence on each investigation, though he did not directly participate in each one.

Many to-be-famous chemists worked in Ostwald’s laboratory. Among them were Arrhenius (Nobel Prize in 1903), van’t Hoff (Nobel Prize in 1901), Walther Hermann Nernst (Nobel Prize in 1920), and Americans Theodore William Richards, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Gilbert Newton Lewis. This succession of scientists solidified physical chemistry as a new branch of chemistry.

Ostwald was greatly involved with communicating knowledge. He published forty-five books, five hundred scientific papers, and thousands of reviews and in 1887 founded, jointly with van’t Hoff, the Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie (journal of physical chemistry). Ostwald continued as editor of this publication through the first one hundred volumes, stepping down in 1922. In 1894, Ostwald’s Die wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der analytischen Chemie (The Scientific Foundations of Analytical Chemistry Treated in an Elementary Manner , 1895) appeared and revolutionized analytical chemistry. From that time on, analytical chemistry was taught in terms of physical chemistry, and the measurement of physical properties became the common thread in all of chemistry.

Ostwald’s 1901 discovery of a method to manufacture nitric acid is his only notable commercial contribution. The process freed Germany from dependence on foreign sources of nitrates for munitions manufacture, an important freedom to have as the world was building toward war.

At the turn of the century a confrontation occurred between two camps in the scientific world. Ostwald headed the “energetics” and Ludwig Boltzmann, also at Leipzig, headed the “atomistics.” Ostwald and his followers claimed to represent “science without suppositions” and demanded that science be purely descriptive and deal only with correlating observable data. As late as 1904, Ostwald did not believe in the existence of atoms and would not use them, even as models, in explaining chemical observations. At some later date, he did relent and accept atoms as models, but he never did rely on them in his own work.

Ostwald was also involved outside chemical research, teaching, and publication. He published books and lectured internationally about methods of teaching, philosophy, painting, and educational reform and published a number of biographies. These activities caused Ostwald to be away from Leipzig much of the time and strained the relationship between Ostwald and his colleagues. This strain was relieved in 1906 when he admitted that he had become exhausted and had lost all interest in doing chemistry and resigned.

Ending his career at the university did not mean a quiet retirement. He had shown an interest in philosophy in publications at the turn of the century, and through these works, and others, Ostwald founded a branch of philosophy natural philosophy. He led the movement for monism, a doctrine that stated that there is only one kind of substance or ultimate reality, and that reality is one unitary organic whole with no independent parts. To Ostwald, the ultimate was energy, as it had been in all of his chemical researches. He wrote and spoke widely on this topic from 1910 to 1914, when World War I brought the effort to an end.

Ostwald put his organizational abilities to work on the national and international scale. In Germany, he founded what became the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, a national bureau of chemistry. He served on the International Commission for Atomic Weights from 1916 to 1932. He cooperated in the founding of the International Association of Chemical Societies in 1911.

The importance of Ostwald’s discoveries in catalysis to the war effort is ironic, because he was an ardent pacifist. He considered war a horrible waste of energy and regularly attended and addressed peace congresses. His pleas for voluntary disarmament went unnoticed, however, and war came. Ostwald took no part in the war and was mentioned by some as a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Always interested in painting, Ostwald, in 1914, turned his skills to the study of color. He devised ways of measuring color, invented the instruments needed, set the standards, and wrote books that were accepted as the classics in the study of color. Ostwald believed that his work on color was his greatest contribution, and there were those in agreement who nominated him as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Physics. Ostwald died on April 4, 1932, at his home, Landhaus Energie, at Grossbothen, near Leipzig.

Significance

Ostwald contributed to scientific knowledge with several sound pieces of chemical research, but his major impact was by way of his organizational skills, his skills as a systematizer, and his writing skills. Chemical knowledge in the 1880’s was expanding at a fast pace and was branching out into considerable new ground. The niche that Ostwald chose to fill was that of synthesizer of this new knowledge to the end that it could be taught and built on.

Wilder D. Bancroft, a student of Ostwald in 1892, distinguished three classes of scientists. The first group is composed of those who make great discoveries, the second those who see the importance and bearing of the discoveries and promote them, and the third the group who have to have discoveries explained to them. Ostwald stood at the head of the second group as a great protagonist and inspiring teacher, more greatly loved and greatly followed than any chemist of his time.

In matters not strictly in the field of chemistry, Ostwald also had vital ideas. He preached the need to conserve natural energy resources, promoted the organization of scientific work as the means to attain solutions to problems, and recognized that new ideas need a champion to push for their acceptance. In each of these ideas, Ostwald stands out as being well ahead of his time.

Bibliography

Bancroft, Wilder D. “Wilhelm Ostwald: The Great Protagonist.” Journal of Chemical Education 10 (1933): 539-542, 609-613. Bancroft was a doctoral student with Ostwald in the late 1880’s and writes about Ostwald as chemist, as teacher, and as synthesizer of diverse information. This is the best and most personal comment, published in English, about Ostwald.

Farber, Eduard. Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry. New York: Henry Schuman, 1953. This text contains a chapter concerning Ostwald. Within the chapter there is a short biographical sketch, a description of the prizewinning chemistry, and an analysis of the consequence of that chemistry.

Harrow, Benjamin. Eminent Chemists of Our Time. 2d ed. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927. Although Ostwald is not treated in a separate chapter in this text, much of his impact on the structure of chemistry in his day is shown through the discussions of his contemporaries.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Meeting of Ostwald, Arrhenius, and van’t Hoff.” Journal of Chemical Education 7 (November, 1930): 2697-2700. Utilizing the recently published autobiography of Ostwald, Harrow concentrates on the details dealing with the way in which a remarkable friendship grew among the three founders of physical chemistry. This short article gives a close look into the meetings that led to Nobel Prizes for each of these men.

Hauser, Ernst A. “The Lack of Natural Philosophy in Our Education: In Memoriam of Wilhelm Ostwald.” Journal of Chemical Education 28 (September, 1951): 492-494. This article concerns itself with the philosophical aspect of Ostwald’s life. It contains an extensive quotation translated from Ostwald’s Grundriss der Naturphilosophie (1908).

Jaffe, George. “Recollections of Three Great Laboratories.” Journal of Chemical Education 29 (May, 1952): 230-238. Jaffe was the last personal student of Ostwald and writes of his recollections of the man and the laboratory. Jaffe also met van’t Hoff and Arrhenius during this period and writes about their interrelationship.

Moore, Forris J. A History of Chemistry. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939. Presents a concise biography of Ostwald and places his work in the context of the developing chemistry of that era.

Stock, John T. Ostwald’s American Students: Apparatus, Techniques, and Careers. Concord, N.H.: Plaidswede, 2003. In the last years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, four hundred Americans studied with Ostwald at the University of Leipzig, where they earned their doctorates. Stock describes these students’ later careers and the significant contributions they made to science and technology.

Wall, Florence E. “Wilhelm Ostwald: A Study in Mental Metamorphosis.” Journal of Chemical Education 42 (January, 1948): 2-10. As the title suggests, this article follows the life of Ostwald from his earliest years through his chemical interests and on to the later eclectic years. There is a very good listing of relevant literature included with this article.