Adolf von Baeyer

Adolf Baeyer married Adelheid (Lida) Bendemann in 1868. They had three children; one daughter, who later married one of Adolf’s students Oskar Piloty and two sons, Hans and Otto. While Hans was a professor of medicine at the University of Munich, Otto was a professor of physics at the University of Berlin.

Baeyer was raised to hereditary nobility on his fiftieth birthday in 1885 and since then he began to be known as Adolf von Baeyer.

Baeyer was active till his end. He died from a seizure on August 20, 1917 at his country home in Starnberger See.

Adolf von Baeyer was born on October 31, 1835, in Berlin. His father, Johann Jakob Baeyer, a lieutenant-general under the Prussian army, was the creator of the European system of geodetic measurement. His mother, Eugenie, was the daughter of famous German author Julius Eduard Hitzig. Adolf von Baeyer was the eldest of his parents’ five children.

Even as a child Adolf was highly inquisitive. At the age of eight, he planted date seeds in a series of pots and fed them successively with milk, wine and ink. However, his experiments at the age of twelve were more successful; he found a new double salt of copper.

Adolf had his secondary education at Friedrich-Wilhelms Gymnasium. In 1853, he joined Berlin University with mathematics and physics as his subjects. Soon he realized that his real interest lay in chemistry. Consequently in 1856, he joined Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen’s laboratory in Heidelberg.

There he worked under German organic chemist Friedrich August Kekulé on methyl chloride. The result of this work was published in 1857. Thereafter, he joined Kekulé's private laboratory in Heidelberg and began to work with him on ingenious structure theory.

Adolf von Baeyer received his PhD in 1858 on his work on cacodyl compounds. Although the work was done in Heidelberg at Kekulé’s laboratory, he received his degree from Berlin University.

Adolf von Baeyer began his academic career as a lecturer (privatdozent) in organic chemistry at the Berlin Gewerbe-Akademie (Trade Academy) in 1860. Although he received a small remuneration he took up the job because the Academy provided him with a spacious laboratory. It is here that Baeyer started his research on indigo.

Until then, the blue pigment could be obtained only from indigo plant grown in India. Consequently the price was too high and the supply was limited. For the chemists, it was a challenge to reproduce the pigment synthetically and make it available at an affordable price.

Although he started his experimentation in 1865, while he was still working at Trade Academy, it took many years to complete. The complex nature of indigo made it a very hard and time consuming task.

Meanwhile in 1866, Baeyer was appointed to the post of the assistant professor in chemistry at the University of Berlin. In the same year, he reduced oxindole to indole using zinc dust. In 1869, he proposed the Baeyer–Emmerling indole synthesis method.

In 1871, Baeyer joined the University of Strasbourg as a full professor and along with working on indigo he kept on experimenting with various products. His theory of carbon-dioxide assimilation in formaldehyde was formed during his tenure here. He also discovered the synthesis of phenolphthalein and obtained synthetic fluorescein during this period.

Synthesizing of indigo, which took almost eighteen years to complete, was one of Baeyer’s most important works. Although his formula was meant only for laboratory production of the pigment his work paved the way for further experimentation and by 1897, indigo began to be produced commercially.

Synthesis of phenolphthalein, a chemical compound used mainly as an indicator in acid based tritrations, is another of his major works done in 1871. To get the product, he condensed phthalic anhydride with two equivalents of phenol under acidic conditions.

Synthesized fluorescein, which is mainly used as a fluorescent tracer for many applications, is another of his important work. In 1871, he prepared it from phthalic anhydride and resorcinol in the presence of zinc chloride via the Friedel-Crafts reaction.