Background

Karl Friedrich Plattner was born on January 2, 1800, at Kleinwaltersdorf, near Freiberg in the Electorate of Saxony in a family of a poor working miner.

Education

Despite financial difficulties, Plattner's father found the means to educate his son first at the Bergschule (mining school) and then, from 1817 to 1820, Plattner studied at the Konigliche Bergakademie, Freiberg.

Career

After studying at the Konigliche Bergakademie, Freiberg, Plattner then entered the metallurgical industry, where he gained rapid promotion and acquired a great reputation as an assayer and analyst. He specialized in the use of the blowpipe, which had become a highly versatile and qualitative instrument in many hands, from Gahn to Berzelius. Plattner perfected the quantitative use of the blowpipe and in 1835 published a treatise (translated into several languages) on its use. Plattner’s blowpipe techniques were grounded in an understanding of chemical reactions, which he utilized in his later work (1856) on smelting.

At the age of thirty-eight, he left Freiberg for Berlin in order to work for a year with Heinrich Rose. Upon his return to Freiberg in 1840, he was appointed to a senior assaying post and then to a chair of metallurgy.

Plattner carried out many experiments, but his work was impeded by failing health and eventually cut short by his death in 1858.

Achievements

• Plattner succeeded in devising dependable methods for all the ordinary useful metals. In particular, his modes of assaying for nickel and cobalt quickly found favor with metallurgists. He also devoted himself to the improvement of qualitative blowpipe analysis and summed up his experience in a treatise Die Probierkunst mit dem Löthrohr (1835), which became a standard authority.
  
  In addition to many memoirs on metallurgical subjects, he also published Die metallurgischen Rostprocesse theoretisch betrachtet, and posthumously Vorlesungen über allgemeine Hüttenkunde.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Plattner's Manual of Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis With the Blowpipe 1902
  • The use of the blowpipe 1854
  • Probirkunst Mit Dem Löthrohre: Oder, Vollständige Anleitung Zu Qualitativen Und Quantitativen Löthrohr-Untersuchungen, Vierte Auflage 1835
  • The Use of the Blowpipe in the Qualitative and Quantitative Examination of Minerals, Ores, Furnace Products, and Other Metallic Combinations 1845
  • Die Metallurgischen Rostprozesse 1856
  • Arte De Ensayar Con El Soplete: Cualitativa Y Cuantitativamente Los Minerales, Aleaciones Y Productos Metalurgicos 1833
  • Beitrag zur erweiterung der probirkunst durch ein systematisches verfahren bei ausmittelung eines in erzen, hÃ1/4tten- und kunst-producten befindlichen ... wismuth auf trocknem wege 1849

Views

Pursuing the chemistry of smelting, Plattner sought to solve the problem (as much a pollution problem as a technical one) of the efficient conversion to sulfuric acid of the sulfur dioxide produced from sulfide ores. Conversion by the chamber process was not difficult in principle, but the necessary, massive structures were so difficult to accommodate in a smelting plant that a simpler process was desirable. Contact catalysis was known (Peregrine Phillips patented his method in 1831) but not perfected.

Connections

colleague:

Clemens Alexander Winkler

December 26, 1838 – October 8, 1904, a German chemist who discovered the element germanium in 1886, solidifying Dmitri Mendeleev's theory of periodicity.

Plattner had laid the foundation of the success achieved in 1875 by his colleague at Freiberg, Clemens Winkler.

colleague:

Heinrich Rose

1795 –1864

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1975
• The Encyclopaedia Britannica
  1911