Introduction and Overview - Important Figures of Analytical Chemistry from Germany in Brief Biographies - page 5

and improved by Anton Friedrich Robert Behrend, Fritz Förster, Walther Hempel,
Justus Liebig, Mohr [ 24 ], Schwarz [ 25 ], Volhard [ 26 ], Winkler [ 27 ]; and the devel-
opment of chromogenic reagents with selectivity and other broad applicability by
Otto [ 28 ], Fehling [ 29 ], Nessler [ 30 ], Dragendorff [ 31 ], Griess and Leibius [ 32 ]
and Ehrlich [ 33 ].
The measurement of physical parameters for analytical purposes was intro-
duced by Ernst Otto Beckmann (ebulliometric and cryoscopic determination of
relative molecular masses, [ 34 ]), and the application of optical phenomena from
the Lambert-Beer Law [ 35 ] to spectral analysis (Kirchhoff and Bunsen [ 36 , 37 ]),
to the use of electrochemical principles such as electrolytic separations (Classen
[ 38 ]) through contributions of Förster [ 39 ] and LeBlanc [ 40 ] to Robert Bunsen,
Walter Hermann Nernst and Ostwald [ 41 ].
Implementation of chemical analysis from mainly metals, minerals and mineral
waters to categories of other analytes and other economical areas led to significant
advances. For example, Justus Liebig's extensive analyses of biological samples
[ 42 ] led to a significant increase of agricultural productivity, and Julius Nessler's
and Stöckardt's [ 43 ] work in agricultural and forestry chemistry has had similar
impacts. The forensic-toxicological procedures and analytical systems of Erdmann
[ 44 ], Mohr [ 45 ], Otto [ 28 ], Sonnenschein [ 46 ], Autenrieth [ 47 ] and Gadamer [ 48 ]
produced substantial advances in poison and other crime detection, and Hoppe-
Seyler [ 49 ] opened up the extremely wide new field of clinical chemistry, which
has included many of the aforementioned methods initiated in the outlined time
frame.
Theoretical advances such as the Lambert-Beer Law [ 35 ], the Nernst Equation
for ionic equilibria or his Partition Law [ 50 ] had general importance for analyt-
ics as well as for technical processes and in the interpretation of biological phe-
nomena. The detection of new elements has been more or less a side effect of the
analytical advances, equally to the sometimes surprising technological applicabil-
ity and success of—originally more academic or purely analytical—results such as
the invention of azo dyes by Griess and Leibius [ 32 ] or the separation of rare earth
elements.
When what became known as chemistry was still in its basic evolution stages
and comprised all its later branches in the centuries before 1800, special chemi-
cal fields of activity developed more and more from the turn to the twentieth cen-
tury and created experts focusing onto smaller sectors of chemistry including that
of analytical chemistry. In the nineteenth century, one could contribute essentially
to analytics even from neighbouring disciplines such as medicine, pharmacy and
biology (e.g. work of Autenrieth [ 47 ], Dragendorff [ 31 ], Ehrlich [ 33 ], Hoppe-
Seyler [ 49 ], Otto [ 28 ], Sonnenschein [ 46 ], Gadamer [ 48 ]). Considering chemical
analytics in a broad sense, it seems appropriate to also include aspects on those
steps forward, which finally contributed to the present tremendous knowledge
and methodologies in biochemistry, biology and medicine and to the fascinating
improvements of our insight into nature.
The image of analytical chemistry at the outgoing nineteenth century is still
dominated by wet-chemical methods (Fig. 1.1 ), but the measurement of physical