Charles Adolphe Wurtz
| Charles Adolphe Wurtz | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
26 November 1817 Wolfisheim, near Strasbourg, France |
| Died | 10 May 1884 (aged 66) Paris, France |
| Nationality | France |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Known for | Wurtz reaction |
| Notable awards | Copley Medal (1881) |
Charles Adolphe Wurtz (French: [vyʁts]; 26 November 1817 – 10 May 1884) was an Alsatian French chemist. He is best remembered for his decades-long advocacy for the atomic theory and for ideas about the structures of chemical compounds, against the skeptical opinions of chemists such as Marcellin Berthelot and Etienne Henri Sainte-Claire Deville. He is well known by organic chemists for the Wurtz reaction, to form carbon-carbon bonds by reacting alkyl halides with sodium, and for his discoveries of ethylamine, ethylene glycol, and the aldol reaction. Wurtz was also an influential writer and educator.
Adolphe Wurtz (he never used the name "Charles") was born in Strasbourg, where his father, Johann Jacob (Jean Jacques) Wurtz, was a Lutheran pastor in the nearby town of Wolfisheim. When he left the Protestant gymnasium at Strasbourg in 1834, his father allowed him to study medicine as next best to theology. He devoted himself specially to the chemical side of his profession with such success that in 1839 he was appointed Chef des travaux chimiques at the Strasbourg faculty of medicine. For the summer semester of 1842 he studied under Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen. After graduating from Strasbourg as M.D. in 1843, with a thesis on albumin and fibrin, he went to Paris, where he first was referred by Jean Baptiste Dumas to Antoine Balard. His employment with Balard lasted a few months, after which Wurtz began work in Dumas's private laboratory. In 1845, he became assistant to Dumas at the École de Médecine, and four years later began to give lectures on organic chemistry in his place. As there was no laboratory at his disposal at the Ecole de Médecine, he opened a private one in 1850 in the Rue Garanciere; but three years later the building was sold, and the laboratory had to be abandoned. In 1850, he received the professorship of chemistry at the new Institut National Agronomique at Versailles, but the Institut was abolished in 1852. In the following year the chair of "pharmacy and organic chemistry" at the faculty of medicine became vacant by the resignation of Dumas, and the chair of "medical chemistry" by the death of Mathieu Orfila. Both of these chairs were now abolished, and Wurtz was appointed to the newly defined post of "organic and mineral chemistry". (At the same time, a new chair devoted exclusively to pharmacy was awarded to Eugene Soubeiran). In 1866, Wurtz undertook the duties of dean of the faculty of medicine. In this position, he exerted himself to secure the rearrangement and reconstruction of the buildings devoted to scientific instruction, urging that in the provision of properly equipped teaching laboratories France was much behind Germany (see his report Les Hautes Etudes pratiques dans les universités allemandes, 1870).
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