Wilhelm Ostwald

Biography

In 1901 Albert Einstein asked Ostwald for a place in his laboratory and was turned down. A few years later Ostwald nominated him twice for the Nobel Prize, in 1910 and in 1913.

Ostwald was born in Riga on 2 September 1853 (21 August, Old Style), the son of Gottfried Wilhelm Ostwald, a master cooper, and Elisabeth, née Leuckel. He was the middle one of three sons. As a child he did experiments at home, mostly with fireworks and photography. From 1864 to 1871 he attended the Realgymnasium in Riga, and in 1872 he entered the University of Dorpat. There he heard lectures on more than chemistry: the humanities, art and philosophy had interested him from youth, and he returned to them later. In 1875 he completed his Kandidat thesis and stayed on at the university, working first at the physics institute under Arthur von Oettingen and then in Carl Schmidt's chemical laboratory. He earned extra money teaching mathematics and science at a secondary school. He presented his master's dissertation on chemical affinity in 1877 and defended his doctorate in 1878.

In 1881 Ostwald received a professorship at the Riga Polytechnic, the technical college of the city; in his recommendation Schmidt called him a skilful experimenter who blew his own glassware and built his own instruments. In Riga he constructed a thermostat, a rheostat and a viscometer, studied the hydrolysis of methyl acetate by measuring the conductivity of solutions, and determined affinity constants of acids. From these measurements grew the dilution law, published in 1888. In 1884 Ostwald read a paper by Svante Arrhenius, then little known, travelled to him in Uppsala, and the two became lifelong friends. Together with Arrhenius, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Walther Nernst he is counted among the founders of physical chemistry.

In 1887 he was called to Leipzig, where he became the world's first professor of physical chemistry. That same year he founded the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie (the journal of physical chemistry) with van 't Hoff and edited it until 1922. From 1889 came Ostwald's Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften (Classics of the Exact Sciences), a series of several hundred small books. In 1898 his new physico-chemical institute opened, and students came to it from many countries: Arrhenius, Nernst, Fritz Haber, Jaffe and others. In 1895 he was elected a corresponding member of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

From 1894 Ostwald worked on catalysis and defined a catalyst as a substance that speeds up a reaction without being consumed in it and without shifting the position of equilibrium. Around 1900, with Eberhard Brauer, his assistant and later son-in-law, he developed the production of nitric acid by oxidizing ammonia over a platinum catalyst. A pilot plant started work in 1902, and by 1906 the plant at Gerthe near Bochum was producing 300 kilograms of acid a day. Combined with the synthesis of ammonia by the method of Haber and Carl Bosch, this process allowed Germany to supply itself with explosives in the First World War; today it is used to make fertilizers. He also described the phenomenon now called Ostwald ripening, in which small particles dissolve while large ones grow, and the rule of stages.

From the 1890s Ostwald preached energetics: he regarded matter as a form in which energy appears, and he put his “energetic imperative” in the words: do not waste energy, use it. In 1895, at the congress of German scientists in Lübeck, his pupil Georg Helm set out these ideas and Ludwig Boltzmann answered with sharp criticism; Arnold Sommerfeld, who was there, said it was like a bullfight in which the bull won. Ostwald rejected atomism for a long time; what convinced him, as he himself told Sommerfeld, were Jean Perrin's experiments on Brownian motion. Around 1900 he introduced the word “mole” into chemistry. From 1901 to 1921 he published the Annalen der Naturphilosophie (Annals of Natural Philosophy), where in 1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared. From 1911 Ostwald presided over the Monist League, founded by Ernst Haeckel.

In 1905 his conflicts with the university leadership sharpened and he applied to resign; in the autumn he lectured at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. In 1904–1905 he had been Harvard's first “exchange professor”. In 1906 Ostwald retired and settled at the estate Energie near Großbothen in Saxony, where he worked as a “free researcher”.

He received the 1909 Nobel Prize for his work on catalysis, the conditions of chemical equilibrium and the rates of reactions. He gave half of the prize money to the Ido movement, Ido being a constructed international language; the money paid for the journal Progreso, which he had proposed in 1908. From 1904 he took part in the congresses of the developers of that language and chaired some of them, having earlier studied Esperanto.

Ostwald painted himself and made his own pigments; after him remained more than a thousand paintings and about three thousand pastels and colour studies. From 1914, commissioned by the German Werkbund (an association of artists, architects and designers), he worked on colour theory. He arranged hues in a double cone with a white apex at the top and a black one at the bottom. The position of a colour was given by the number of the full colour and two letters for the black and white shares. His largest sample consisted of 2,520 measured colours. In 1917 came the Color Primer (Die Farbenfibel), which went through fourteen editions by 1930, and in the same year the first colour atlas, with 2,500 colours. His ideas influenced artists of the Dutch De Stijl group and of the Bauhaus, among them Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. He is also thought to have had a hand in the RAL colour system adopted in Germany in 1927.

Ostwald died on 4 April 1932, according to some accounts in a hospital in Leipzig, according to others in Großbothen. His ashes were buried in the former quarry of the Energie estate, where a park named after him now stands.