Ostwald, Wilhelm

▪ German chemist

Introduction

in full  Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald 

born Sept. 2, 1853, Riga, Latvia, Russian Empire

died April 4, 1932, near Leipzig, Ger.

 Russian-German chemist and philosopher who was instrumental in establishing physical chemistry (chemistry) as an acknowledged branch of chemistry. He was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria (chemical equilibrium), and chemical reaction velocities.

Early life and education

      Ostwald was the second son of Gottfried Ostwald, a master cooper, and Elisabeth Leuckel, both descendants of German immigrants. After his early education in Riga, he enrolled in 1872 at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Est.), where he studied chemistry under Carl Schmidt and received a candidate's degree (1875), a master's degree (1876), and a doctorate (1878).

      In 1880 Ostwald married Helene von Reyher. They had two daughters and three sons, of whom Wolfgang Ostwald (Ostwald, Wolfgang) became a famous colloid chemist. After their move to Leipzig, the Ostwalds became German citizens in 1888.

Scientific career

      In 1881 Ostwald was appointed a full professor of chemistry at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. In 1887 he accepted the chair in physical chemistry at the University of Leipzig, from which he retired in 1906. By the time he started his scientific career, chemistry, particularly in Germany, was dominated by synthetic organic chemistry (chemistry), which was primarily concerned with investigating what products can be produced from chemical compounds (chemical compound). Ostwald recognized the lack of a more profound and quantitative understanding of general issues of chemistry, such as the selective forces (chemical affinities or activities) in chemical reactions, which he sought to achieve by applying physical measurements and mathematical reasoning. To that end, in 1875 he began studying the equilibrium point in an aqueous solution in which two acids (acid) compete to form an acid-base reaction (acid–base reaction) with one base. Because chemical analysis would have changed the equilibria, he skillfully adapted the measurement of physical properties, such as volume, refractive index, and electrical conductivity, to indirectly analyze the reactions. The idea was not completely new, as the Danish chemist Julius Thomsen (Thomsen, Julius) had already studied the heat of such reactions. Ostwald could, however, also draw on the important law of mass action (mass action, law of), which had been recently proposed by the Norwegian chemists Cato Guldberg (Guldberg, Cato Maximilian) and Peter Waagey, for analysis of his experimental results. Ostwald extended and generalized such approaches, adapting physical measurements to issues of chemical dynamics, to create a program not only of his own chemical work but also of a new school of physical chemistry.

      In 1884 Ostwald received the doctoral thesis of Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (Arrhenius, Svante August) on the electrical conductivity of solutions, which contained the bold claim that salts (salt), acids, and bases dissociate into electrically charged ions (ion) when dissolved in water. The dissociation theory eventually became a backbone of the new school of physical chemistry, whose members were initially known as the “Ionists” and who soon counted Arrhenius himself among their members. Ostwald immediately recognized that if all acids contained the same active ion, then the differing chemical activities of various acids simply would be due to the concentration of active ions in each—and the concentration of active ions in turn would be dependent on the differing degrees of dissociation of the acids. In addition, if the law of mass action was applied to the dissociation reaction, a simple mathematical relation could be derived between the degree of dissociation (α), the concentration of the acid (c), and an equilibrium constant specific for each acid (k):

α²/(1 − α)c = k.

      This is Ostwald's famous dissolution law (1888), which he tested by measuring the electrical conductivities of more than 200 organic acids, thereby substantiating the dissociation theory.

      At the same time, the Dutch chemist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (Hoff, Jacobus Henricus van 't), who would join Ostwald and Arrhenius to form the “triumvirate” of the new physical chemistry school, suggested his theory of osmosis, according to which the osmotic pressure of solutions depends on the concentration of dissociated ions, in analogy to the pressure relationship obeyed by a perfect gas. Putting his theory on general thermodynamic (thermodynamics) grounds, van 't Hoff also derived Raoult's laws of vapour pressure, which assert that adding a solute to a liquid lowers its freezing point and raises its boiling point because of a reduction in the solution's vapour pressure. (For instance, seawater has a lower freezing point and a higher boiling point than fresh water.) Through the combination of the triumvirate's work, the new physical chemistry grew to a comprehensive theory of solutions based on both thermodynamics and dissociation theory.

      Ostwald was especially successful in systematizing the subject of physical chemistry, applying it to other fields, and organizing a school. This was particularly important, as most chemists rejected the dissociation theory on partly justified grounds, such that convincing them required both concessions about its restricted validity and proofs of its broad usefulness. In various textbooks on general, inorganic (chemistry), and analytical chemistry (chemistry), Ostwald presented the new ideas not only in a comprehensive form as a new branch of chemistry but also as an extremely fruitful approach to classical issues. He particularly revolutionized analytical chemistry through solution theory and his theory of indicators. His Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie (“Journal for Physical Chemistry”), founded in 1887, rapidly established itself as the standard journal in the field. Furthermore, the Leipzig Institute of Physical Chemistry attracted students and researchers from around the world. Educated in both the new ideas and experimental skills, numerous students of Ostwald later became professors of physical chemistry in many countries.

      Ostwald's later work on catalysis (catalyst) originated from early attempts at taking reaction velocities as a measure of chemical activity. As that turned out to be wrong on thermodynamic grounds, he broadly investigated temporal aspects of chemical reactions and provided a systematic conception of the field. He first recognized catalysis as the change of reaction velocity by a foreign compound, which allowed him to measure catalytic activities. He distinguished catalysis from triggering and from autocatalysis, which he considered essential to biological systems. His most famous contribution to applied chemistry was on catalytic oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid, a patented process that is still used in the industrial production of fertilizers (fertilizer).

Other notable activities

      By the late 1880s, Ostwald's interests had begun to include cultural and philosophical aspects of science. In 1889 he started republishing famous historical science papers in his series Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften (“Classics of the Exact Sciences”), with more than 40 books published during the first four years. The history of chemistry, already part of his textbooks for educational reasons, became a subject of its own in many further books. He also published a volume on natural philosophy, derived from a series of lectures (1905–06) he had given as the first exchange professor at Harvard University in the United States. He was particularly interested in general laws of scientific progress, psychological characteristics of great scientists, and conditions for scientific creativity.

      The more Ostwald became convinced that thermodynamics is the fundamental theory of science—for which he saw evidence in the pioneering works of the American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (Gibbs, J Willard) and others—the more he engaged in natural philosophy. Two aspects may roughly characterize his philosophy. First, he asserted the primacy of energy over matter (matter being only a manifestation of energy) in opposition to widespread scientific Materialism. Ostwald reformulated older concepts of dynamism dating back to the 17th-century German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm) with the principles of thermodynamics to form a new metaphysical interpretation of the world that he named “energetics.” Second, he asserted a form of Positivism in the sense of rejecting theoretical concepts that are not strictly founded on empirical grounds. Although energetics found few adherents, the latter position found many contemporary proponents, such as the physicist-philosophers Ernst Mach (Mach, Ernst) in Austria and Pierre Duhem (Duhem, Pierre) in France. As a consequence of his beliefs, for some 15 years Ostwald rejected atomism and was heavily involved in philosophical debates with his atomist colleagues, such as the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (Boltzmann, Ludwig Eduard), before he acknowledged the growing experimental evidence for the atomic hypothesis in 1909.

      Ostwald was quick to enlarge his energetics, incorporating sociology, psychology, and ethics. Beyond academic interest, he made it an “energetic imperative” of his own life: “Do not squander energy—utilize it!” Since Ostwald had strong utilitarian ideas of science, he considered every obstacle to the progress of science as squandering of “social energy.” Thus, after his early retirement in 1906 from the University of Leipzig, he became an enthusiastic reformer in educational and organizational matters of science on the national and international level. Ostwald was active in numerous academies, learned societies, and international movements, such as for the standardization of scientific documentation and the establishment of a “universal” artificial language (he contributed to Ido, a derivative of Esperanto). Moreover, he considered that both war and traditional religion squandered energy, so he committed himself to the international peace movement and served as president of the Deutscher Monistenbund, a scientistic quasi-religion founded by the German zoologist and evolutionary proponent Ernst Haeckel (Haeckel, Ernst).

Later years

      After formally retiring in 1906, Ostwald continued as a freelance researcher at his private estate near Leipzig, where he had assembled a large library and a laboratory. He started another scientific career in colour theory in his 60s, supplementing his lifelong passion for painting. Once more he applied the multilevel approach characteristic of his earlier work. He developed instruments for measuring colours, elaborated a sophisticated classification of colours in order to derive mathematical laws of harmony, produced specimens in his chemical laboratory, founded a factory for paint boxes, wrote several textbooks on colour theory and its history, and was active in reforms of artistic education. After a short period of suffering from bladder and prostate troubles, Ostwald died in a Leipzig hospital and was buried at his private estate.

      Ostwald was a man of science in the broadest sense and an extremely prolific writer. He was the editor of several scientific and philosophical journals, and he wrote 45 books and many booklets, about 500 scientific papers, some 5,000 reviews, and more than 10,000 letters.

Joachim Schummer

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