Charles-Adolphe Wurtz - Scientific and Academic Work

Scientific and Academic Work

Influenced by such leading figures as Liebig and Dumas, by 1856 Wurtz became a powerful advocate of a reform in chemical theory then being led by Charles Gerhardt and Alexander Williamson. This new chemistry of the 1850s took the idea of chemical atoms seriously, adopted atomic weights for the elements that strongly resemble the modern ones, and proposed a unitary schematic plan that opposed the dualistic theory derived from the work of Jons Jacob Berzelius. Soon thereafter, Wurtz also adopted the new structural theory that was developing from the work of younger chemists such as August Kekulé. However, a kind of skeptical positivism was influential in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, and Wurtz's efforts to gain a favorable hearing for atomism and structuralism in his homeland were largely frustrated.

Wurtz's first published paper was on hypophosphorous acid (1841), and the continuation of his work on the acids of phosphorus (1845) resulted in the discovery of sulfophosphoric acid and phosphorus oxychloride, as well as of copper hydride. But his original work was mainly in the domain of organic chemistry. Investigation of the cyanic ethers (1848) yielded a class of substances which opened out a new field in organic chemistry, for, by treating those ethers with caustic potash, he obtained methylamine, the simplest organic derivative of ammonia (1849), and later (1851) the compound ureas. In 1855, reviewing the various substances that had been obtained from glycerin, he reached the conclusion that glycerin is a body of alcoholic nature formed on the type of three molecules of water, as common alcohol is on that of one, and was thus led (1856) to the discovery of the glycols or diatonic alcohols, bodies similarly related to the double water type. This discovery he worked out very thoroughly in investigations of ethylene oxide and the polyethylene alcohols. The oxidation of the glycols led him to homologues of lactic acid, and a controversy about the constitution of the latter with Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe resulted in the discovery of many new facts and in a better understanding of the relations between the oxy- and the amido-acids. In 1855, he published work on what is now known as the Wurtz reaction.

In 1867 Wurtz synthesized neurine by the action of trimethylamine on glycol-chlorhydrin. In 1872 he discovered the aldol reaction and characterized the product as showing the properties of both an alcohol and an aldehyde. Alexander Borodin discovered the reaction independently in the same year. The product was named an aldol, pointing out its double character. This led to a second confrontation with Kolbe.

In addition to this list of some of the new substances he prepared, reference may be made to his work on abnormal vapor densities. While working on the olefins he noticed that a change takes place in the density of the vapor of amylene hydrochloride, hydrobromide, &c, as the temperature is increased, and in the gradual passage from a gas of approximately normal density to one of half-normal density he saw a powerful argument in favor of the view that abnormal vapor densities, such as are exhibited by sal-ammoniac or phosphorus pentachloride. are to be explained by dissociation. From 1865 onwards he treated this question in several papers, and in particular maintained the dissociation of vapor of chloral hydrate, in opposition to Etienne Henri Sainte-Claire Deville and Marcellin Berthelot.

For twenty-one years (1852–1872) Wurtz published in the Annales de chimie et de physique abstracts of chemical work done out of France. The publication of his great Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée, in which he was assisted by many other French chemists, was begun in 1869 and finished in 1878; two supplementary volumes were issued 1880–1886, and in 1892 the publication of a second supplement was begun. Among his books are Chimie médicale (1864), Leçons élémentaires de chimie moderne (1867), Théorie des atomes dans la conception générale du monde (1874), La Théorie atomique (1878), Progrés de l'industrie des matières colorantes artificielles (1876) and Traité de chimie biologique (1880–1885). His Histoire des doctrines chimiques, the introductory discourse to his Dictionnaire (also published separately in 1869), opens with the phrase, La chimie est une science française. Although it raised a storm of protest in Germany, the sentence is less nationalistic than it appears; he intended to refer only to the birth of chemistry under the great Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, rather than asserting exclusive French national ownership of the science.