Wilhelm Ostwald Facts
Wilhelm Ostwald Facts
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| Interesting Wilhelm Ostwald Facts: |
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| Wilhelm Ostwald was born in Riga, Latvia where his father was a master cooper. |
| In 1872 he entered Dorpat University to study chemistry. |
| He was awarded a PhD in 1875. |
| In 1881 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Polytechnicum in Riga. |
| From 1887 to 1906 he was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Leipzig University. |
| Three of his students who earned Nobel Prizes in Chemistry were Svante Arrhenius (1903), Jacobus Van't Hoff (1901), and Walther Nernst (1920). |
| In 1902 he patented the Ostwald process for the manufacture of nitric acid which is used in fertilizer production. |
| Ostwald was an "Exchange Professor" at Harvard University in 1904-1905. |
| Ostwald's process along with the nitrogen fixing process invented by Haber and Bosch made possible the large-scale production of fertilizers and explosives. |
| Ostwald made breakthroughs in dilution theory and Ostwald's rule is named for him. |
| He first used the word "mole" to define the molecular weight of a substance in mass grams. |
| Ostwald invented a pipette for measuring viscous materials which was named for him. |
| The Ostwald-Folin pipette is commonly used in medical laboratories for pipetting blood. |
| Ostwald was an artist and wrote several articles on color theory. |
| His writings influenced Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. |
| He was interested in an international language and learned Esperanto. |
| He donated half of the Nobel Prize money to the ido meter. |
| He was a major supporter of Die Brucke Institute which sought to catalog, systematize and preserve knowledge in a variety of fields. |
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