Anton Geuther was a German chemist. He was a professor at the University of Jena.
Background
Anton Geuther was born on April 23, 1833, in Neustadt Bei Coburg, Bayern, Germany. He was the son of Christian Friedrich Geuther, a master weaver, brewer, and farmer who was also municipal treasurer of his native city. His mother was Anna Cordula Eichhorn.
Education
In accordance with his father’s wishes, Geuther learned the weaver’s trade and after his apprenticeship attended the Realschule in Coburg and, later, the one in Saalfeld. At Saalfeld he was more attracted by the scientific than by the commercial and technical subjects and thus, following the certificate examination, decided to study science. He entered the University of Jena, where among his teachers were H. W. F. Wackenroder (chemistry) and Matthias Schleiden (botany). He went to Göttingen in 1853 where he remained for ten years. He attended lectures on mineralogy, physics, organic chemistry, and philosophy but, most important, he was for years an assistant to Friedrich Wöhler. He received his doctorate in 1855.
After receiving his doctorate Geuther then advanced through various posts in Wöhler’s institute, becoming successively lecture assistant, private assistant, head assistant, Privatdozent, and associate professor.
In 1863 Geuther went to the University of Jena as a full professor. Geuther remained in Jena for the rest of his life, achieving success both as a researcher and as a teacher. Great demands were made on Geuther’s idealism, for although his summerhouse had been equipped for chemical research through the patronage of Grand Duchess Sophie, of Saxe-Weimar, it was never adequate to his needs. A new structure had already been agreed to when, in 1889, he contracted typhus - and he did not live to see it built.
Under Wöhler’s influence, Geuther’s years at Göttingen were devoted primarily to inorganic chemistry. In Jena, where organic chemistry took precedence in his work, Geuther made his most important discovery, the synthesis of acetoacetic ester. The starting point for this achievement was his investigation of the constitution of alkyl compounds; among them was acetic acid, which, as the result of a then-common but false assumption concerning the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen, Geuther thought to be dibasic. Through the reaction of metallic sodium and acetic ester, he hoped to obtain the dibasic sodium salt of acetic acid; instead, the result was acetoacetic ester. Geuther determined the composition of this previously unknown substance ánd ascertained its great reactivity. Moreover, from the color reaction with ferric chloride characteristic of phenoloid compounds and from the green color of the copper salts, he inferred the presence of an acidifying hydroxyl group in the molecule. A long controversy with Edward Frankland and Baldwin Duppa, who suspected that a ketonic form was involved, was not settled until 1911 when Geuther’s successor Ludwig Knorr demonstrated that under normal conditions both substances exist in the compound. As the first example of a keto-enol tautomerism, acetoacetic ester was of great significance in the development of theoretical organic chemistry.
Geuther was a strict adherent of J. J. Berzelius’ dualistic, electrochemical conception; the substitution theory, which was rapidly gaining prominence, appeared to him insufficient “if it is a question of real insight and reduction to general principles.” Geuther interpreted his extensive investigations of double compounds in the light of the dualistic theory and discussed the constitution of these compounds in a manner that suggests Alfred Werner’s interpretation of complex compounds.
Connections
In 1863 Geuther married Amalie Agnes Sindram, the daughter of Wilhelm Sindram, director of a hospital at Göttingen. They a son and a daughter.