Winkler
NAME: Winkler, Clemens (Alexander)
ACHIEVEMENT(S): 19th-century chemist who introduced a method of technical gas analysis, and discovered the element germanium (1886).
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 26 December 1838, at Freiberg, Germany
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 8 October 1904, at Dresden, Germany. Aged 65
DISCIPLINE: Analytical chemist
FIELD: Analytical chemistry
LANGUAGE: German
PARENTS: Kurt Winkler and ?
SIBLINGS: ?
SPOUSE: ?
CHILDREN: ?
EDUCATION: Bergakademie, Freibergk
MAJOR WORK: 'Handbook of Technical Gas Analysis' (1876)
LIFE AND TIMES: Clemens Winkler was born in 1838 at Freiberg, Germany, the son of Kurt Winkler, a former pupil of <father taught by> Berzelius* and manager of a large cobalt glassworks.
He attended local schools in Freiberg, assisting in his father's laboratory during vacations, and on leaving school he entered the cobalt works, which produced cobalt as a colorant for ceramics manufacturers like <supplier to firm of> Wedgwood*.
In 1861 Winkler became works manager, and began investigating the possibility of using the sulphur gases from the works' smelting furnaces as a raw material in the preparation of sulphuric acid. To this end, he worked on refining the methods of industrial gas analysis, and developed the Winkler burette.
In 1873, Winkler was appointed professor of analytical and technical chemistry at the Freiberg School of Mines, where he continued his investigations of sulphuric acid. In 1874, for the Badische Company, he devised a method for producing sulphuric acid, now known as the contact process: molten sulphur was decomposed over a red heat to produce oxygen and sulphur dioxide, which were then recombined by passing over a hot (platinized asbestos) catalyst and converted to sulphur trioxide - which in turn could
be combined with water to make sulphuric acid.
By this method, Winkler was able to produce large quantities of oleum (a solution of sulphur trioxide in 100 percent sulphuric acid), an important chemical in the dyeing industry, by a process that was a significant advance on earlier methods – since previous experimenters had tried to use finely divided metals or oxides without the asbestos support.
In 1876 Winkler published a two-volume textbook for his students: 'Handbook of Technical Gas Analysis,' which established Winkler as the creator of technical gas analysis as a branch of analytical chemistry. As a result, by 1884 it had already become standard in Germany to perform technical gas analyses in chemical works in order to test the efficiency of such apparatus as steam boiler furnaces, etc.
In 1885, Winkler made a routine analysis of a sample from a recently discovered vein of argyrodite taken from the Freiberg mines, but his investigation established the composition of argyrodite to be 74.7 percent silver, 17.1 percent sulphur, 0.66 percent iron oxide, 0.22 percent zinc oxide and 0.31 percent mercury, producing a total of 93 percent.
Using his early training in mineral analysis, Winkler realised that some unrecognized element must be present, and in 1886 he succeeded in isolating it by first heating argyrodite with soda ash to make it soluble, and then treating the solution with sulphuric acid.
After filtering off the precipitated sulphur, arsenic and antimony, he
next treated the solution with strong hydrochloric acid for as long as a precipitate formed, and then saturated it with hydrogen sulphide, which produced by precipitation a sulphide of the mystery element.
This sulphide was then roasted at a low temperature, warmed with nitric acid, and the oxide obtained was finally ignited and reduced to a metalloid by heating in a current of hydrogen.
Using the process of spectrum analysis developed <used technique of> Bunsen* and <used technique of> Kirchhoff*, Winkler was then able to prove that the resulting substance was the element predicted in 1871 by the Russian chemist <confirmed prediction of> Mendeyelev*, who had called the hypothetical element 'ekasilicon'. Winkler instead named the new element ‘germanium,’ a rare silvery-grey metalloid (i.e. intermediate in properties between the metals and the non-metals), never found free in nature, lying between silicon and tin in Group IVa of the periodic table.
Germanium did not become economically significant until after 1945, when its properties as a semiconductor in electronic devices were first developed and, although many other substances now also are used as semiconductors, germanium remains of primary importance in the manufacture of transistors and of components for rectifiers and photocells.
It is also used as a component of alloys and in phosphors for fluorescent lamps, in equipment used for detecting and measuring infrared radiation (e.g. such as windows and lenses), while the high index of refraction of germanium dioxide makes it valuable as a component of lenses in optical devices.
Winkler retired from the Freiberg School of Mines in 1902, and died two
years later.
ASSESSMENT: Hotshot chemist
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work related to that of <work related to> Cavendish*.
ONELINER: Clemens Winkler, discoverer of germanium
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB, DSB
Partington, James Riddick, A Short History of Chemistry, 1948
Weeks, M.E., Discovery of the Elements, Easton, P.A., 1939