Johann Friedrich Meyer

Background

Johann Friedrich Meyer was born on October 24, 1705, in Osnabrück, Niedersachsen, Germany. Meyer's father, who died in 1714, was a physician; his mother, the daughter of an apothecary. In childhood, Meyer was intended for the clergy.

Education

Johann Friedrich Meyer went at age fifteen into his grandmother’s apothecary shop, where he served six years as an apprentice and studied pharmacy. He later served as a journeyman in Leipzig, Nordhausen where he studied mining and metallurgy.

Career

After working as a journeyman in Leipzig, Nordhausen, Frankfurt am Main, Trier, and Halle, Meyer returned to Osnabrück and in 1737 inherited his grandmother’s shop.

Meyer is best known for having been wrong. Just a few years after Joseph Black explained that the difference between the mild and the caustic alkalies lies in the presence or absence of “fixed air” (1756), Meyer published his Chymische Versuche zur näheren Erkenntnis des ungelöschten Kalchs (1764). In this work, he argued that causticity in alkalies arose from a substance that entered the mild alkalies from the fire. He called this substance acidum pingue and characterized it as a combination of a previously unknown acid substance with the matter of fire or light. It was, Meyer said, responsible for “sharp” properties and thus was found in acids, caustic alkalies, and fire. It was not to be confused with phlogiston, which turned calxes into metals; acidum pingue calcined metals, causing the famous - or notorious - weight gain. Meyer’s peculiar theory of the acidum pingue combined features from the Paracelsian sulfur of metals and Lemery’s "matter of fire." The theory avoided one set of errors by attributing the "augmented calx" to a gain of matter, but it incurred others by claiming causticity to be a result of an accession of acidum pingue.

Achievements

• Meyer's work was highly respected on the Continent in the 1760s and early 1770s; and his theory of causticity was accepted by a number of chemists, including Baume, Pörner, and Wiegleb. Black took special care to answer point by point this challenge to his own findings. Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau avowed at different times that Meyer’s writings had considerable merit. But with the explication over the next fifteen years of the role of oxygen in combustion and acidification, and with the recognition that Black’s work had inaugurated this great train of discoveries in pneumatic chemistry, Meyer’s claim to a place among the builders of eighteenth-century chemistry suffered a blow from which it has never recovered.

Views

Quotations: "Providence made me a pharmacist."

Connections

In 1738 Johann Friedrich Meyer married a clergyman’s daughter, who died in 1759; they had no children.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981