Alfred Werner was a chemist and educator whose accomplishments included the development of the coordination theory of chemistry. This theory, in which Werner proposed revolutionary ideas about how atoms and molecules are linked together, was formulated in a span of only three years, from 1890 to 1893. The remainder of his career was spent gathering the experimental support required to validate his new ideas. For his work on the linkage of atoms and his coordination theory, Werner became the first Swiss chemist to win the Nobel Prize.
Werner was born December 12, 1866, in Mulhouse, a small community in the French province of Alsace. He was the last of four children born to Jean-Adam Werner, a factory foreman and farmer, and Salome Jeanette Tesche, daughter of a wealthy German family. Alsace was French when Werner was born but was annexed into Germany during the Franco-Prussian war. Although the Werner family maintained strong patriotic ties with France and continued to speak French in their home, young Werner began his education in German schools.
At age six he was enrolled at the Ecole Libre des Freres, partly because of his mother's recent conversion to Catholicism. In 1878 he entered the Ecole Professionelle, a technical school, and began studying chemistry. The family had moved from the city to take up residence on a nearby farm, where Werner's father was engaged in dairying. The farm provided an ideal place for young Werner to begin his experiments. During this time, an unpleasant explosion in his home lab almost ended his career in chemistry and forced him to move his vials and chemicals into the barn. Werner's earliest known work was a paper on urea that he submitted in 1885 to the director of the Mulhouse Chemie Schule. He was 18. Although the paper was scientifically unsound and showed youthful inexperience, it did reveal a talent for classification and systematization that would prove invaluable in later years.
In late 1885 Werner began serving a one year term of compulsory military duty. Stationed in the town of Karlsruhe, Werner enrolled in two organic chemistry courses taught at the Technical University there. After his tour of duty, he relocated to Zurich, Switzerland, to continue his education in chemistry at the Federal Institute of Technology. Werner excelled in chemistry but performed poorly in mathematical courses, especially descriptive geometry. After six semesters of work and completion of a paper describing the successful preparation of five compounds, he received a diploma in technical chemistry. A year later, in 1890, he was awarded a Ph.D.
Werner's doctoral thesis in 1890 was his first publication and his most important work in organic chemistry. Along with his graduate advisor, Werner showed that the shape of nitrogen compounds are similar to carbon compounds. His second paper, "Contribution to the Theory of Affinity and Valence," concerned the forces of attraction that hold carbon atoms together. Werner attacked the traditional theory that pictured atoms of carbon held together in rigid formations. He suggested that attractive forces emanate in all directions from the center of a central atom. Using this novel idea, Werner was able to derive kekulé formulas--notations for chemical structures in which valence bonds are illustrated with short lines--for organic carbon compounds.
His most important paper, "Contribution to the Construction of Inorganic Compounds," was written in 1893. Werner awoke at 2 a.m. one morning with the solution to the riddle of molecular structure. He began writing furiously and by 5 p.m. his monumental paper on coordination theory was finished. In his paper Werner proposed that single atoms or molecules could be grouped around a central atom according to simple geometrical principles. These coordination bonds were immensely successful in explaining the properties of observed compounds and in predicting the existence of unknown compounds.
During this time, Werner had been developing other dimensions of his career as well. In 1891 he went to Paris as a post-doctoral student and worked with the French chemist Pierre Berthelot on thermochemical problems. Werner began his teaching career during the summer semester of 1892, as a lecturer in atomic theory at the Federal Institute of Technology. In the fall of 1893, as a result of his almost overnight success with the publication of his theory, he was appointed professor of organic chemistry at the University of Zurich. In his first course, the chemistry of aromatic compounds, Werner proved to be a demanding professor whose exuberance and contagious enthusiasm for atoms and molecules inspired and enthralled students. Although Werner's theoretical and experimental work was primarily in the field of inorganic chemistry, it was not until 1902 that he was allowed to teach inorganic chemistry.
After writing his ground-breaking papers, Werner had set about immediately to prove his theory. In a span of some 25 years he painstakingly prepared over 8000 compounds and published his findings in more than 150 publications. In 1907 he succeeded in preparing a beautiful ammonia-violeo salt, a compound predicted by his theory. With this preparation his opponents finally conceded defeat. Werner's greatest experimental success came in 1911 with the successful resolution of optically active coordination compounds --substances able to deflect polarized light. A few years later he resolved carbon-free coordination compounds and ended forever carbon's dominance in stereochemistry. For his theoretical and experimental work on coordination theory, Werner was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1913.
Werner married Emma Wilhelmine Giesker in 1894, the same year he became a Swiss citizen. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Werner was a robust man with a jovial sense of humor. He was a connoisseur of good foods and wine and enjoyed billiards and chess with friends and family. Werner's hobbies included photography, stamp collecting, mountain climbing, and ice skating.
Werner published prolifically in both organic and inorganic chemistry. He wrote two textbooks on inorganic and stereochemical topics. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the prestigious Leblanc Medal of the French Chemical Society. Werner died on November 15, 1919, at a Zurich psychiatric institution, from arteriosclerosis of the brain. At his funeral he was remembered for his numerous contributions to science and teaching.
This is the complete article, containing 1,017 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
