VON LIEBIG

VON LIEBIG
(1803-1873)

German chemist, Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) who, by 1831, could obtain fairly reliable empirical formulas as a result. (Liebig was one of the great chemistry teachers of all time. He taught at the University of Giessen, where he established the first real laboratory course in chemistry. Numerous chemists studied with him and learned laboratory procedures from him. Liebig was one of the influences making chemistry, in which France had been pre-eminent in the eighteenth century, almost a German monopoly in the nineteenth century.) Soon afterward, in 1833, the French chemist Jean Baptiste Andre Dumas (1800-1884) devised a modification of the method, one which allowed the chemist to collect nitrogen also among the products of combustion. In this way one could determine the proportions of nitrogen in an organic substance.