Background

Achard, baptized François-Charles, was born on April 28, 1753 of French Protestant émigré parents. His father, Guillaume Achard, a minister, died when Franz Karl was only two years old. In 1759 his mother, whose maiden name was Margarette Henriette Roupert married a Charles Vigne.

Education

Of Achard’s upbringing and early education, virtually nothing is known. It was Marggraf, especially, who trained young Franz Karl, gave him entrée into Berlin scientific circles, and finally obtained, in June 1776, his admission to the Berlin Academy. Achard studied many subjects, including meteorology, evaporation chillness, electricity, telegraphy, gravity, lightning arresters, and published in German and French.

Career

At the age of twenty Franz Achard began his scientific career in association with the botanist Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch and with the renowned chemist A. S. Marggraf. When Marggraf died in 1782, Achard succeeded him as director of the “Class of Physics” of the Berlin Academy.

In 1747 Marggraf had published a paper in which he showed that crystallizable sugar could be extracted from various plants native to Europe. The most promising of these plants appeared to be the common beetroot. At his estate near Berlin, Achard began experiments in 1786, in an effort to develop a process for extracting sugar from beets in quantities large enough and at cost low enough to be commercially valuable. In 1799, after having tried various methods of cultivation and extraction, he had a loaf of beet sugar, along with a description of the process by which it had been made, presented to Frederick William III. The king appointed a special committee to investigate this new process, and when it issued a favorable report, Achard was given financial aid to build a beet-sugar refinery in Kunern, a Silesian village near Breslau. The factory was completed in 1801, and it began operations the following year.

Achard’s new process of obtaining sugar was simple but costly. It consisted of boiling specially cultivated, white Silesian beets and then pressing them to extract a sugary liquid. This liquid, added to that obtained from a second pressing, was boiled to remove excess water and then placed in an oven at moderate temperature to allow crystallization. After a crust had formed, the liquid was cooled and the sugar was separated by filtration. The muscovado, or raw sugar, could be refined to any desired degree of purity by recrystallization. The by-products were beet pulp, which could be used for cattle fodder, and molasses, which could be made into spirits.

News of Achard’s accomplishment spread quickly throughout Europe. In France the first details were communicated by Van Mons in an article written for the Annales de chimie. The Institut formed a committee of chemists and agriculturalists to examine Achard’s process and suggest possible improvements. In June 1800 it issued an encouraging report and made several valuable recommendations, the most important of which was that the beets be pressed without cooking them. Achard afterward adopted this technique in order to reduce the considerable expenditures for fuel.

Under the artificial stimulus of the Continental System, which reduced the supply of West Indian sugar, and with the aid of liberal governmental financing, the beet-sugar industry prospered briefly. In 1813 an investigating commission of the French government reported that there were 334 beet-sugar factories in France, with a combined annual production of 7,700,000 pounds. Although no such specific figures exist for Germany, it seems evident that the beet- sugar industry was also widely established there. However, when the Napoleonic Wars came to an end and normal markets were reestablished, the industry all but disappeared. It revived about the middle of the nineteenth century, and made its greatest strides with the development of the diffusion process of extraction and with the cultivation of new strains of beets containing over twice as much sugar as those Achard had used.

After a five-week illness, Achard died only a week before his sixty-eighth birthday. He was survived by his second wife and several children. His death passed virtually unnoticed in academic circles, from which he had long since retired.

Achievements

• Achard is known for several minor achievements in applied chemistry, most notably his description of a workable alloy of platinum and arsenic and his process for fabricating lye from common salt and litharge. In addition, he was one of the first to conduct detailed investigations of galvanism. Achard is best known for his development of a method of extracting sugar from beets in large quantity. He was a pioneer in turning to practical account A. S. Marggraf's discovery of the presence of sugar in beetroot, and by the end of the 18th century he was producing considerable quantities of beet-sugar, though by a very imperfect process, at Kunern, on an estate which was granted him about 1800 by the king of Prussia.
  
  Also, for his discoveries in the acclimatisation of tobacco to Germany, the king granted him a lifetime pension of 500 taler. Achard was also esteemed by Frederick William II of Prussia. He is also noted for building an optical telegraph between Spandau and Bellevue in 1794. This device had been invented just one year before by Claude Chappe.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bestimmung der Bestandteile einiger Edelgesteine (German Edition)

    (Bestimmung der Bestandteile einiger Edelgesteine ist ein ...)

  • Instruction Sur La Culture Et La Recolte Des Betteraves: Sur La Maniere D'En Extraire Economiquement Le Sucre Et La Sirop (1811) (French Edition)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Franz Carl Achards Chymisch-Physische Schriften (1780) (German Edition)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Vorlesungen Über Die Experimentalphysik (German Edition)

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • Chymisch-physische Schriften (German Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Bestimmung Der Bestandtheile Einiger Edelgesteine (German Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Views

In his youth, Achard was a prolific writer. He published articles on the thermal expansion of gases and liquids, the effects of soluble and insoluble fluids on the freezing point of water, cooling by evaporation, and various electrical phenomena, as well as numerous papers on miscellaneous chemical and physical subjects. Most of these articles were published in French in the Nouveaux mémoires of the Berlin Academy, in Rozier’s journal (Observations sur la physique. . .). and in the Journal littéraire (Berlin). In addition, Achard published German articles in Crell’s Chemische Annalen and in two volumes of collected essays (1780. 1784).

None of Achard’s early papers were of great importance. In general, he eschewed theoretical discussion and concentrated his efforts on the detailed investigation of facts. Typical of this procedure was his paper on cooling by evaporation, which amounted to little more than a short history of previous investigations of the topic, followed by a description of his experimental method and long lists of various liquids and their relative abilities to cool. I he few general remarks that he appended to this discourse had been established years, even decades, before.

Quotations: Achard described the sugar beet as: "one of the most bountiful gifts which the devine munificence had awarded to man on earth."

“Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.”

"The determination of the relationship and mutual dependence of the facts in particular cases must be the first goal of the Physicist; and for this purpose he requires that an exact measurement may be taken in an equally invariable manner anywhere in the world… Also, the history of electricity yields a well-known truth—that the physicist shirking measurement only plays, different from children only in the nature of his game and the construction of his toys."

"A physicist shirking measurement plays, different from children only in the nature of his game and ... his toys."

Membership

In 1782 Achard was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1776 he was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin.

Connections

Franz Karl Achard was married twice, and after his death, he was survived by his second wife and several children.

Father:

Max Guillaume Achard

Mother:

Marguerite Elisabeth (Rouppert)

associate:

Johann Gleditsch

At the age of twenty Franz Achard began his scientific career in association with the botanist Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch.

associate:

Andreas Marggraf

When Marggraf died in 1782, Achard succeeded him as director of the “Class of Physics” of the Berlin Academy.

References

• Franz Karl Achard und die Fruhzeit der Deutschen Zuckerindustrie (Der Abhandlungen Der Philologisch-Historischen Klasse der Sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band 39, No. 3)
• History Of Saginaw County, Michigan: Historical, Commercial, Biographical, Profusely Illustrated With Portraits Of Early Pioneers, Rare Pictures And ... Of Representative Citizens Of Today, Volume 1 This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed work