Development of Instrumental Techniques: The Twentieth Century - Important Figures of Analytical Chemistry from Germany in Brief Biographies - page 106

Fig. 4.9 Wilhelm Geilmann
on his way to the lecture hall,
around 1960. Photo Günther
Tölg, Dortmund, with
permission
with the investigation of historic glasses and other evidence of human technical
activities. He tried to answer two questions:
1. What kind of changes was experienced by objects during centuries or even mil-
lennia exposed to different soils and atmospheric constituents?
2. Which materials were used by the old craftsmen and how were they handled? [ 62 ].
Johann Peter Caspar Arthur S imon [born 25 February 1893, Barmen (now part
of Wuppertal), died 5 May 1962, Dresden]
Arthur Simon grew up as son of a merchant. In 1913, he matriculated in chem-
istry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. 1 year later, he was con-
scripted as an officer into the army. After a slow recovery from a battle injury, he
resumed his study at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Under the guid-
ance of Richard Zsigmondy, he completed his PhD on the quantitative determi-
nation of antimony (1922). The determination of antimony according to Simon
and Neth's method became for many years a standard analytical procedure [ 63 ].
Simon worked as assistant in Göttingen, Clausthal and Stuttgart. In Stuttgart, he
completed his habilitation thesis in 1927 on oxides and oxide hydrates and became
Extraordinary Professor there in 1930. He developed the Simon Müller furnace,
which extended the accessible temperature range for thermal analyses to above
2,000 K, and the Simon cryostat (1927 patented). He extended his scientific inter-
est to structural analysis and—together with Josef Goubeau—introduced Raman
spectroscopy to German chemistry [ 64 ].