Lothar Meyer

His education and career

Julius Lothar Meyer was born in Varel on August 19th, 1830. His father worked as a physician in Varel. Lothar was the fourth of seven children, but his elder brothers and sisters died very early. First he went to a public school . In 1841 he attended the secondary school in Varel, which was built on his father's instigation. As he was nearly 14 years old, he got seriously ill, so his father forbid him all intellectual activities. After one year his health improved, so he could attend a grammar school in Oldenburg. He was one of the best pupils and liked the old languages. Due to the industrial revolution he became interested in mathematics and science. In his youth there were many pioneering events, for example the invention of photography and the opening of the first German railway line.
On May 8th, 1851 he passed his A- Levels and decided to become a physician like his father. At the university of Zürich he started to study medicine and after two years he went to Würzburg and took his doctor's degree on February 25th, 1854. Then he wanted to expand his chemical knowledge, so he went to Heidelberg and did chemical studies with Bunsen. This was when he became acquainted with many young chemists, who have become famous later for example with Kekule and von Bayer. In 1856 Lothar Meyer went to Königsberg for three terms, to attend Fr. Neumann's lectures on mathematical physics, which were famous at that time. In 1858 he took his second doctor's degree with an article about the influence of carbon monoxide on blood. On February 21st, 1859 he qualified as a university lecturer for physics and chemistry with a script about the chemical doctrines of Bertollet and Berzelius.

His life as a university teacher


From 1859 to 1860 he held lectures at the physiological institute at Breslau. In August, he married Johanna Volkmann and had four children with her. On October, 1st he was appointed to a professorship at the royal school of forestry in Eberswalde. In spring 1868, he got a professorship at the polytechnic Karlsruhe.Here he could develop his abilities as a teacher and explorer to the full for the first time. He improved his work permanently: modern theories about chemistry. Besides, he did research on the Periodic Table of the Elements. In 1876 Lothar Meyer accepted a professorship at the university of Tübingen where he finished his university career. He tried to find experimental principles for particular questions connected with the Periodic Table of the Elements. Investigating atomic weights was one of his main concerns and he constantly improved the appropriate determination methods. In 1883 the book "The atom weights of elements" was published by Säbert and Meyer. He received many honours, for example the "Ehrenkreuz der Württembergischen Krone". For the terms 1894/95 his colleagues elected him as rector magnificus of the university of Tübingen. On April 11th, 1895 he died unexpectedly of a stroke at nearly 65 years.
Today we honour Lothar Meyer not only as one of the creators of the "Periodic Table of the Elements", but also as precursor of physical chemistry.

This text was translated into English by Hendrik Hoffstedde
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