“with what things, and in what positions the same first beginnings are held in union, and what motions they mutually impart and receive.”
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Charles Adolphe Wurtz
Charles Adolphe Wurtz was an Alsatian French chemist. He is best remembered for his decades-long advocacy for the atomic theory and for ideas about the structures of chemical compounds, against the skeptical opinions of chemists such as Marcellin Berthelot and Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville. He is well known by organic chemists for the Wurtz reaction, to form carbon-carbon bonds by reacting a…
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science · French chemist (1817–1884) · chemist · politician · university teacher · physician · also Charles Adolphe Wurtz, Wurtz
Born 26 November 1817 · Died 12 May 1884 · Q366051
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2026· 1 entry
2025· 1 entry
Nature: Charles Adolphe Wurtz
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1884· 2 entries
Died 1884-05-12.
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Career landmark: funeral.
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1881· 5 entries
Won Copley Medal (1881).
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Awarded Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour (1881).
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Career landmark: irremovable senator (1881–1884).
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Career landmark: president of the French Academy of Sciences (1881–1881).
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Wurtz was elected life senator
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1880· 1 entry
Was vice-president and in 1881 president of the French Academy of Sciences, which he entered in 1867 in succession to Théophile-Jules Pelouze
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1879· 1 entry
Awarded Faraday Lectureship Prize (1879).
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1875· 1 entry
Resigning the office of dean but retaining the title of honorary dean, he became the first occupant of a new chair of organic chemistry at the Sorbonne, which the government had established due to his influence
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1872· 1 entry
Discovered the aldol reaction and characterized the product as showing the properties of both an alcohol and an aldehyde
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1869· 1 entry
And finished in 1878; two supplementary volumes were issued 1880–1886, and in 1892 the publication of a second supplement was begun
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1867· 1 entry
Wurtz synthesized neurine by the action of trimethylamine on glycol-chlorhydrin
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1866· 1 entry
Wurtz undertook the duties of dean of the faculty of medicine
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1864· 2 entries
Awarded Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1864).
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Awarded Jecker Prize (1864).
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1855· 2 entries
Reviewing the various substances that had been obtained from glycerin, he reached the conclusion that glycerin is a body of alcoholic nature formed on the type of three molecules of water, as common alcohol is on that of
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Published work on what is now known as the Wurtz reaction
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1854· 1 entry
Awarded honorary member of the Physics Association (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (1854).
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1850· 2 entries
Received the professorship of chemistry at the new Institut National Agronomique at Versailles, but the Institut was abolished in 1852
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In the Rue Garanciere; but three years later the building was sold, and the laboratory had to be abandoned
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1845· 1 entry
Became assistant to Dumas at the École de Médecine, and four years later began to give lectures on organic chemistry in his place
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1843· 1 entry
With a thesis on albumin and fibrin, he went to Paris, where he first was referred by Jean Baptiste Dumas to Antoine Balard
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1839· 1 entry
Was appointed Chef des travaux chimiques at the Strasbourg faculty of medicine
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1834· 2 entries
Studied at Jean Sturm Gymnasium (1834).
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His father allowed him to study medicine as next best to theology
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1817· 1 entry
Born 1817-11-26.
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