Background

Heinrich Rose was born on August 6, 1795, in Berlin, Germany. Rose was born into a family of scientists. His father and grandfather - both of whom were named Valentin Rose - were pharmacists who wrote on chemical and pharmaceutical subjects. His brother Gustav became a well-known mineralogist, and cousins and nephews later distinguished themselves in medicine and industrial chemistry.

Education

Rose’s first training was in pharmacy, at Danzig. After in 1821 Rose left Stockholm and proceeded to Kiel, he submitted his dissertation there on the oxygen and sulfur compounds of titanium and received his Ph.D. degree.

Career

After the war intervened, Rose and his brothers joined the Prussian forces for the last campaign against Napoleon. He was in Paris in 1815 with the occupying armies. On his return to Berlin, he continued his studies, working for a time in the summer of 1816 with Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who, in a sense, succeeded as the purest and narrowest German chemical analyst. Klaproth had been long and intimately associated with the Rose family: he had worked as an assistant to the elder Valentin Rose and had become the guardian of his children after Rose’s death in 1771.

Heinrich Rose next was apprenticed to a pharmacist in Mitau (near Riga), where he spent much of his spare time in discussion with Theodore von Grotthus, who had an estate nearby. Rose's earliest published writing appeared in a work by Grotthus. In 1819 Rose traveled via St. Petersburg and Finland to Stockholm to work with Berzelius. The great Swedish chemist had him continue some researches he had already begun on mica and started him on the investigations of the properties of titanium, which became the subject of his dissertation.

Eilhard Mitscherlich came to Stockholm in 1819 and Gustav Rose followed in 1821. Rose, Mitscherlich, and Wohler became Berzelius’ main disciples in Berlin. Rose left Stockholm in the autumn of 1821 and proceeded to Kiel, where he submitted his dissertation on the oxygen and sulfur compounds of titanium. The doctorate was presently awarded. He then returned to Berlin. In 1822 he became Privatdozent in chemistry at the University of Berlin; in the following year he was made extraordinarius, and in 1835 ordinarius. Although he traveled some in later years, his life after 1822 centered on the university routine of teaching and research and on the round of activities of scientific Berlin.

A bare list of Rose’s papers presents at first glance a confusing picture of analytical results without plan or direction. Indeed, the bulk of his papers consists of miscellaneous analyses of minerals that he collected (he went with Alexander von Humboldt and Ehrenberg on an expedition to the Urals in 1829), or that his brother Gustav submitted to him for analysis, or that sundry mineralogists, both amateur and professional, sent to him from all over the world. There were also analyses of a few compounds of practically the whole range of metals, earths, and alkaline metal-earth. Rose also conducted several series of systematic investigations, some lasting several years. He was almost always working on several projects at the same time and thus the investigations overlap.

He amplified his first researches on titanium with a number of papers on this element in the 1820s and one in 1844 on titanic acid. Starting in 1826 he examined the properties of phosphorus and its acids; the reports of this work (twenty-five papers or more) continued until 1849 and ran concurrently with research on ammonia compounds since Rose thought that ammonia and phosphoretted hydrogen were “analogous” substances.

In 1844 he began to investigate the properties of the mineral columbite. That led him to his discovery of niobium and to his classic papers, which continued until his death, on the properties of niobium and tantalum. Intermittently he presented the results of experiments on the compounds of chlorine and sulfur -, especially the metallic and alkaline-metal-earth compounds. Information on these compounds was useful for analytical purposes, of course, but was also important because they were central to the chemical theory.

In 1851 Rose began investigating the behavior of water in chemical compounds and its influence on chemical decomposition, particularly among the metal salts of weak acids. Berzelius had noted that the so-called law of neutrality did not always hold in reactions involving these compounds. Precipitates from solutions of earth and metal salts by alkaline carbonates, for example, sometimes resulted in basic hydrated salts rather than in carbonates corresponding to the original alkaline one. Rose was able to show the influence of temperature and concentration on reactions of this kind, and it reaffirmed his belief that Berthollet's insights into the influence of physical circumstances on chemical reactions were better founded than was generally supposed. Rose had found numerous instances of the law of mass, but he made no attempt to generalize or quantify it, as Guldberg and Waage did a short time later.

Rose also contributed about fifteen papers on organic chemistry. In 1839 he briefly joined the European debate on the theory of the subject with a paper on etherification but most of his work in this area was again analytical, although he seems to have been intrigued by the ways in which living things incorporate and use inorganic substances: hence his analyses of iron in blood, silica and iron in infusoria, and the series of papers (1848-1850) entitled “The Inorganic Components of Organic Bodies.”

The Handbook of Analytical Chemistry, first published in 1829, was a modest work in one volume intended for beginners. Demand for it grew, however, and it went through several editions, becoming over the years more encyclopedic and comprehensive until for a time it stood as the standard reference work on the subject. The seventh (and last) edition was prepared after Rose’s death by one of his students, Rudolph Finkener. The theoretical framework and nomenclature in the Analytical Chemistry were that of Berzelius, from whose general dualistic atomic theory Rose, like Berzelius’ other great students Mitscherlich and Wohler, never strayed.

Achievements

• Rose’s major achievement began in 1844 with his investigation of the properties of the mineral columbite, which led him to his discovery of niobium and which continued until his death, researching on the properties of niobium and tantalum. Also, he was able to collect very impressive results of important experiments on the compounds of chlorine and sulfur, especially the metallic and alkaline-metal-earth compounds, which became central to the chemical theory.
  
  Another Rose’s contribution to chemistry was in a piecemeal cumulative lifelong effort that can be divided into two aspects: first, the training he gave to students directly at the University of Berlin and indirectly through his great textbook on analytical chemistry; and second, the scores of analyses of mainly inorganic substances and minerals, the reports on which were published with unflagging regularity from 1820 until several years after his death. Most of them appeared in Poggendorff’s Annalen, in the Berichte of the German Chemical Society, and in the Monatsberichte of the Prussian Academy, and many were translated and published in other major European journals of chemistry.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Traité complet de chimie analytique

    (Volume 2)

    1859
  • Traité pratique d'analyse chimique: suivi de tables, servant, dans les analyses, à calculer la quantité d'une substance d'après celle qui a été trouvée d'une autre substance

    (Volume 1)

    1859
  • A Manual of Analytical Chemistry 1851
  • A Practical Treatise of Chemical Analysis: Qualitative 1848

Membership

In 1830, Heinrich Rose was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Royal Society, Prussian Academy of Sciences, Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Russian Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 

  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , Sweden

  1830 - 1864

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Rose the man is best conveyed in the following description by a French student, Adolphe Remele, who said of the master's lectures: "He looked upon the various substances that he was manipulating, as well as their reactions, under a thoroughly familial point of view: they were like so many children entrusted to his tutelage. Every time he explained simple, clear, well-defined phenomena, he assumed a jovial and smiling countenance; on the other hand, he almost got angry at certain mischievous bodies, the properties of which did not obey ordinary laws and troubled general theoretical views; in his eyes, this was unruly behavior."

Connections

Rose was twice married. To his great grief, he survived his second wife and a daughter by that marriage.

Father:

Valentin Rose

Brother:

Gustav Rose

employer:

Martin Klaproth

associate:

Theodor Grotthuss

employer:

Jöns Jacob Berzelius

Baron Jöns Jacob Berzelius (20 August 1779 – 7 August 1848), known throughout his life as simply Jacob Berzelius or Jakob Berzelius, was a Swedish chemist. Berzelius is considered, along with Robert Boyle, John Dalton, and Antoine Lavoisier, to be one of the founders of modern chemistry.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 11
  1975
• Archiv Der Pharmazie Volumes 175-176
  1866