Today, we create the first research laboratory. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Long ago I wrote a master's
thesis on the properties of a chemical called
aniline. That was an exciting time. I'd never heard
of aniline, but I learned that it was a dye base and
that it might make a good rocket fuel. I also had to
learn how to find data in a German periodical called
Liebig's Annals of Chemistry. It'd be another
twenty years before I learned the remarkable way
Liebig's life was interwoven with the aniline I was
studying.
Baron Justus von Liebig was born in Darmstadt in
1803. He took up chemistry when he was seventeen.
When he was twenty, he went to Paris for a year to
study with the famous French chemist Gay-Lussac.
Gay-Lussac opened his eyes to the new idea that we'd
need accurate experiments to make sense of chemistry.
Liebig came back to a post at the University of
Giessen in Germany. There he turned his young man's
enthusiasm on Gay-Lussac's ideas. He worked
single-mindedly to set up a chemical research
laboratory. He had to spend his own salary on
equipment. By 1827, Liebig had a twenty-man
operation, the likes of which the world had never
seen.
Liebig is honored for his work in organic,
pharmacological, and agricultural chemistry. But this
laboratory was his greatest contribution. Other
chemists had to copy it to keep up with him. It was
the first systematic research laboratory, and it
changed our thinking. Before Liebig, research was an
amateur's game. Now it was being put into the hands
of a new breed of professionals.
And there's more to the story. In 1843, one of
Liebig's former students sent him an oil he'd
isolated from coal tar. The lab found a compound in
it that reacted with nitric acid to make brilliant
blue, yellow, and scarlet coloring agents. It was a
compound Liebig had already anticipated, a form of
benzene with one hydrogen atom replaced by an amino
group. They named it aniline.
By 1860 Germany had built a new dye industry,
beginning with aniline. That dye industry, in turn,
helped to carry Germany into world leadership in
industrial chemistry. And, while their leadership
owed much to Liebig's ideas about chemistry, it owed
far more to his vision of systematic research,
invention, and development.
So, while the Germans were setting up their dye
industry, Edison, Bell and many others created their
own versions of Liebig's laboratory here in the
United States. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the research and development laboratory was altering
the face of America even faster than it'd altered
Europe.
Thus our very concept of systematic research emerged
in the age-old process of transmutation that has to
occur between students and teachers. Justis von
Liebig learned much from the great chemist
Gay-Lussac. But it was in the process of turning that
knowledge around in the light, and making it into
something wholly new, that Liebig altered human
history.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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