Carl Schorlemmer
German chemist (1834-1892)
Carl Schorlemmer FRS (30 September 1834 – 27 June 1892) was a German and British chemist who did research on hydrocarbons, particularly paraffins, and was a pioneer in the study of the history of chemistry. He was a professor of chemistry at Owens College, Manchester and a fellow of the Royal Society (1871) and the American Philosophical Society (1878). He was also a revolutionary of 1848, an early Communist, and a personal friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who was one of the thirteen people to attend Marx's funeral; he is sometimes known as "the red chemist."
Early life and education
Schorlemmer was born on 30 September 1834 in Darmstadt, German Confederation, the son of a joiner. He was able to visit Realschule and later — against the will of his poor father — trade school. As a teenager, he participated in the German revolutions of 1848–1849 in Baden.
Schorlemmer started his training to become a pharmacist in 1853 in Groß-Umstadt. During his training he made own chemical experiments in the laboratory and was interested in astronomy and botany. After two and a half years he passed his exam, became an assistant pharmacist and worked in the Schwanen pharmacy in Heidelberg. Having attended some lectures of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, he studied pharmacy and chemistry in Heidelberg and in Giessen (where he attended lectures of Heinrich Will and Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp, a historian of chemistry).
Career
At age 24 he moved to Manchester as a private assistant to chemist Henry Roscoe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carl Schorlemmer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.