Paul Walden

After the British bombing of Rostock, Walden and his wife were left homeless. They traveled throughout Germany until Walden got the job of lecturer in Gammertingen, where he taught into his 80s.

Due to the post-war division of Germany into four parts, he was unable to collect his pension; this situation forced him to continue lecturing until the end of his life.

Walden died on 22 January 1957, at the age of 93, in Gammertingen, West Germany.

He was born on 26 July 1863 in Rozula, within what is now the Paraguja municipality of Latvia, to a large family of peasants.

When he was only four years old, both of his parents died, leaving him in the care of his twelve older siblings. Two of his older brothers, who were working in Riga, supported Walden through childhood and paid for him to attend boarding school and eventually attend university.

In 1882, Walden completed his school education; having attended a general high school in the town of Cesis and a technical high school in Riga.

Walden’s academic life began in December 1882, when he enrolled in Riga Technical University and began focusing his studies on chemistry.

In 1886, he published his first scientific study, which focused on the reactions of nitric and nitrous acid together with various reagents. He analyzed the colors of these reactions and established the limits of sensitivity of the color method for detecting nitric acid.

In April 1887, still in university, he was appointed as a member of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society.

In the same year, Walden began collaborating with Wilhelm Ostwald, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and mentor to Walden. Together, the two published a joint work in that year, which assessed how molecular weight determined the electrical conductivity of aqueous solutions of salts.

In 1888, having already published papers of his own and jointly with Ostwald, Walden graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from Riga Technical University. He remained at the same university, now as an assistant to professor C. Bischof.

He is known for his path-breaking invention, known as Walden Inversion, which demonstrated that using certain exchange reactions, it is possible to obtain different stereoisomers from the same compound.

He synthesized the first room-temperature ionic liquid, ethyl ammonium nitrate.