Background
Karl Fresenius was born on December 28, 1818, in Frankfurt, Germany. He was the son of Jakob Heinrich Fresenius and Maria Veronika Finger. Until the Thirty Years’ War most of his male ancestors had been Protestant ministers.
Germany
Carl Remigius Fresenius
Regina-Pacis-Weg 3, 53113 Bonn, Germany
In 1840 Fresenius entered the University of Bonn, where he studied science, history, and philosophy.
Ludwigstraße 23, 35390 Gießen, Germany
In 1841 Fresenius migrated to the University of Gießen.
Germany
Carl Remigius Fresenius
Germany
Carl Remigius Fresenius
chemist editor educator scientist
Karl Fresenius was born on December 28, 1818, in Frankfurt, Germany. He was the son of Jakob Heinrich Fresenius and Maria Veronika Finger. Until the Thirty Years’ War most of his male ancestors had been Protestant ministers.
After attending elementary and secondary school in Frankfurt and in Weinheim, Fresenius was apprenticed to an apothecary. He frequently attended the public science lectures at the Physical Society and other institutions, and in 1840 he entered the University of Bonn, where he studied science, history, and philosophy. A year later he migrated to the University of Gießen. Fresenius received his doctorate for Anleitung zur qualitativen chemischem Analyse on 23 July 1842.
After receiving his doctorate, Fresenius stayed at the University of Giessen as assistant in Liebig's laboratory and an assistant professor. In 1845 the Wiesbaden Agricultural College in the duchy of Nassau offered Fresenius a position as professor of chemistry, physics, and engineering. He accepted and moved to Wiesbaden. The college was very poorly equipped, and Fresenius had no laboratory for teaching or for his own experimental work. He decided to establish one. With a modest subsidy from the duchy, he bought a building and equipped it. This laboratory, which opened in 1848, served several purposes. It offered training in practical chemistry, especially analytic procedures. When it opened, five students started work there under the direction of an instructor, Emil Erlenmeyer, later professor of chemistry at the University of Munich. By 1854-1855 there were thirty-eight students and three instructors. A school of pharmacy was subsequently added. The duchy of Nassau allowed college credit for study at Fresenius’ laboratory, but this was discontinued after Nassau was annexed to Prussia. The laboratory then switched to training food chemists and public health personnel. As the role of practical education began to increase at the universities, the laboratory turned more and more to the training of laboratory technicians. It also conducted analyses for industry, soon acquiring an international reputation in this field. Its arbitrational analyses settled many disputes in foreign countries. Fresenius ran the enterprise until his death, and his research institute still operates under the direction of the Fresenius family.
In 1845 Fresenius also published his Anleitung zur quantitativen chemischen Analyse. After describing the analytic operations, the book discusses the forms in which the individual elements can be determined. It then deals with the separations but fails to offer any particularly coherent system. It is also noteworthy that the book does describe many examples of indirect analysis. In many places, too, Fresenius’ book touches upon the thermal behavior of analytic precipitates, indicating their thermal stability and discussing the nature of thermal decomposition processes. He can therefore rightly be regarded as one of the pioneers of thermal analysis.
In 1862 Fresenius founded the journal Zeitschrift für analytische Chemie. The earliest chemical journals date from the last two decades of the eighteenth century. For almost a century, though, there was no differentiation within the general field of chemistry. The founding of the Zeitschrift für analytische Chemie marked the beginning of specialization.
The nature of an independent science of analytical chemistry was thus proclaimed. Fresenius himself published many papers on the results of his experimental research. While all of them were scientifically precise, they dealt mostly with special cases and, as regards methodology, contained nothing remotely comparable in significance to his qualitative system. He reported his analyses of numerous mineral waters and explored in detail the possible analytic uses of potassium cyanide; and he was concerned with the detection and quantitative determination of arsenic in cases of poisoning and with the testing of potash, soda, acids, and pyrolusite. He reported also on the determination of nitric acid, lithium, a great many metal alloys, sulfuric acid, metal ores, and boric acid, and the separation of the salts of the alkaline earth metals. Most of those studies consisted of experimental and critical testing of existing methods and of selection of the most favorable operating conditions rather than of a quest for new methods and forms of analysis. To render the analytic process more precise and refine its methods, Fresenius determined the solubility of many analytic precipitates and, on the basis of those tests, recommended correction values for analytic calculations. He also engaged in food research, primarily in analysis of fruit and wine.
Fresenius was active in that period when analytical chemistry was serving not only to increase man’s knowledge of the constituents of his environment but also was being increasingly used for day-to-day control of industrial products. Analytic laboratories became the natural and indispensable adjuncts of factories in which chemical analyses were an everyday routine. These laboratories required trained personnel, reliable and fast analytic techniques, and an expedient way to prepare information for the analytical literature. Fresenius recognized that chemical analysis had ceased to be a scholarly preoccupation of the few and had become the daily occupation of the many, and he made it his job to help satisfy those needs. This was the aim of his school, his analytic research institute, and his journal. Even most of his own scientific writings were oriented toward the practical and the industrial.
Carl was a member of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker.
Contemporaries characterized Fresenius as a deeply religious man, with an excellent sense of humor, and an exemplary father.
Fresenius married his cousin Charlotte Rumpf in 1845. They had four daughters and three sons, two of whom, Heinrich and Wilhelm, became chemists. After more than twenty-five years of marriage Fresenius’ wife died, and Fresenius married Auguste Fritze, a friend of his deceased wife.