Julius lothar meyer biography summary
•
Lothar Meyer
German physician and chemist (–)
For the German footballer, see Lothar Meyer (footballer).
Julius Lothar Meyer (19 August – 11 April ) was a German chemist. He was one of the pioneers in developing the earliest versions of the periodic table of the chemical elements. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (his chief rival) and he had both worked with Robert Bunsen. Meyer never used his first given name and was known throughout his life simply as Lothar Meyer.
Career
[edit]Meyer was born in Varel, Germany (then part of the Duchy of Oldenburg). He was the son of Friedrich August Meyer, a physician, and Anna Biermann. After attending the Altes Gymnasium in Oldenburg, he studied medicine at the University of Zurich in Two years later, he studied pathology at the University of Würzburg as a student of Rudolf Virchow. At Zurich, he had studied under Carl Ludwig, which had prompted him to devote his attention to physiological chemistry. After graduating as a Doctor o
•
The periodic table is an iconic emblem of science. For both Meyer and Mendeleev, writing a textbook proved to be the impetus for developing the periodic table—a device to present the more than 60 elements known at the time in an intelligible mode. Today’s instantly recognizable table includes well over elements.
Julius Lothar Meyer (–) and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (–) worked at the University of Heidelberg only fem years apart—both under the direction of Robert Bunsen—but they arrived there with significantly different backgrounds. Meyer was virtually born into a scientific career. He came from a medical family of Oldenburg, Germany, and first pursued a medical grad. In medical school he became interested in chemistry, especially physiological topics like gases in the blood.
Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk, Siberia, where his father taught Russian literature and his mother owned and operated a glassworks. His early contacts with political exiles gave him a lifelong love of l
•
Julius Lothar Meyer
(–) German chemist
Meyer was the son of a doctor from Varel in Germany. He qualified in medicine himself in after studying at Zurich and Würzburg and gained his PhD from the University of Breslau in At first his interests were physiological but he slowly moved into chemistry. He became professor of chemistry at Karlsruhe in where he stayed until he moved to the chair at Tübingen (–95).
Meyer is best remembered for his early work on the periodic table. He was much impressed by Stanislao Cannizzaro, expounding his work in his book Die modernen Theorien der Chemie (; Modern Chemical Theory). In writing his textbook it had occurred to him that the properties of an element seem to depend on its atomic weight. Meyer plotted the values of a certain physical property, atomic volume, against atomic weight. He found clear signs of periodicity, the graph consisting of a series of four sharp peaks. He noticed that elements with similar chemical properties occur at compara