Julius Lothar Meyer | Biography

Julius Meyer, most often known as Lothar Meyer, was the son of a prominent physician and a physician's daughter. Although Lothar intended to become a physician, physical frailties temporarily ended his education at age fourteen. His father, believing that an avoidance of all mental exertion would cure Lothar's severe headaches, secured for him a gardener's position at the grand duke of Oldenburg's summer palace. Within a year a vast improvement in his heath allowed Meyer to return to studies. After graduating the Gymnasium at Oldenburg in 1851, he began medical studies at the University of Zurich, but after two years he transferred to Würzburg which granted him an M.D. in 1854. Fascination with the chemistry of gases as exhibited by his dissertation, "On the Gases of the Blood," led him to Heidelberg to study with Robert Bunsen, the era's authority in gasometric analysis. In 1858 the University of Breslau awarded Meyer the Ph.D. for research on the effect of carbon monoxide on the blood. The following year he became the director of the laboratory in the Physiological Institute at Breslau and remained there until 1868 when he became chemistry professor at Karlsruhe Polytechnic Institute. He moved to Tübingen in 1876 and taught there until his death.

Meyer's interest in the chemical teachings of Jöns Berzelius, the creator of the system of using initial letters for symbols of chemical elements, coupled with the his work with gases apparently prepared him to tackle the chaos in chemical terminology and nomenclature that existed in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1860, August Kekulé organized an international conference at Karlsruhe to remedy the confusion. At the meeting Meyer acquired a copy of Stanislao Cannizarro's presentation on the significance of Avogadro's hypothesis in establishing atomic and molecular weights. Deeply impressed by this pamphlet, Meyer wrote Die modernen theorien der Chemie (1864; "Modern Chemical Theory"), which included a table of twenty- eight elements arranged in order of increasing atomic weight and grouped into six families, each member of which had the same valence. The table left a space for an unknown element with an atomic weight of 73.1 (now known to be germanium). Although other chemists had offered arrangements of elements before, Meyer believed that the key to understanding chemical properties of elements, even those as yet undiscovered, lay in an arrangement according to atomic weight. The book's first edition appeared later in English, French, and Russian. In 1868 notes prepared for a new edition included an expanded table of fifty-two elements arranged in fifteen families which included the B-subgroups. A modified version of this table appeared in "die Natur der Chemischen Elemente als Function ihrer Atomgewichte" (1870;"The nature of the chemical elements as a function of their atomic weights") months after Dmitri Mendeleev published a similar table. Both Meyer and Mendeleev received credit for developing the periodic table, and they shared the Royal Society's Davy Medal in 1882 for their accomplishment. For years thereafter Meyer devoted himself tirelessly to recalculating the atomic weights on the basis of hydrogen, assigning it the value of one.

Meyer conducted a large volume of chemical work in other fields including molecular volumes, solubilities, diffusion, boiling point, chlorine and oxygen carriers, and mass action. In organic chemistry he proposed the first "centric" formula for the structure of benzene in which each carbon atom used three of its four valence bonds and the unused fourth bond pointed to the center of the ring. His study of the effects of time, temperature, solvents, and the concentration of reagents led him to advocate quantitative studies.