Chemistry & Friedrich Wehler

A quiet, gentle person, Friedrich W÷hler combined his "passion for chemistry" with a "great love of the open air, the beauties of nature and of all living things" (Findlay, 1965, pp. 323-324). Indeed, that branch of chemistry dealing with compounds of carbon is widely considered to have been started by W÷hler (Smith, 1949, p. 259). According to W÷hler's colleague, Justus Liebig, his synthesis of urea marked "the first organic compound artificially produced" (Partington, 1964, pp. 258-260). Born at Eschersheim, Germany on July 31, 1800, Friedrich W÷hler received a Doctor of Medicine at Heidelburg in 1823. On the advice of Leopold Gmelin, Professor of Medicine and Chemistry, however, W÷hler chose to devote himself to chemistry rather than medicine (Findlay, 1965, pp. 323-324). This decision led W÷hler to the chemistry laboratory of J÷ns Jacob Berzelius in Stockholm, Sweden (Hartley, 1971, p. 80). Of the many scientific leaders that emerged from Berzelius' laboratory, W÷hler would become the most

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tinct branch of organic chemistry (Williams, 1995, p. XVI). In addition to repudiating vitalism and the Natural Theologists, W÷hler also contributed to the development of several fundamental chemical concepts. During the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, a considerable number of substances obtained from animal and plant sources were in common use. For example, sugar was being extracted from sugar cane, and medically useful substances were being extracted from herbs. Unfortunately though, these substances could only be identified according to origin and use. As the demand for such products increased, better methods were needed for determining their identity and purity. Thus, general rules and basic chemical theories became necessary. The theory of elements and atoms provided some of the required explanations. However, elementary analyses only gave the proportions of the weights of the elements, not the proportions of their atoms. This left many questions. In 1824, Gay-Lussac and Liebig compared their analyses of the silver salt of fulminating acid with W÷hler's composition for the silver salt of cyanic acid. The researchers found that, while the two salts' properties were completely different, thei
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