Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Liebich, the son of a German drug, fuel and chemical marketer, has regarded his home as his "chemical paradise" since childhood, where there are many chemical materials, medicines and reagents for him to play with. He likes to do small experiments and even sneak up to the attic to do experiments with mercuric sulfate. Not wanting to get into trouble, a strong explosion shook the whole building and damaged a corner of the roof.

Instead of being scolded, his parents praised him for "courage" and "pursuit", which tapped out his creative potential. In order to encourage his hobby, his father simply converted the back kitchen of the shop into a laboratory for him to do experiments. In the osmosis and hands-on activities, Liebich had a deep love for chemistry and entered the chemical life from then on.

In 1822, after receiving his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Erlangen in Germany, Liebich came to Paris and became a research assistant to the famous chemist Galusack. Giloussack's experimental methods and skills and rigorous scientific spirit had an important impact on Liebich. As early as when he was a teenager, he was deeply impressed by the obsolescence of the regularization and formulation of German school education, and was determined to reform German chemistry education. However, things were not as smooth as expected.

Liebich left Paris and returned to Darmstad in April 1824 at the age of 21. He came to Gieson University with a letter of recommendation from Hambold. This is a school with outdated equipment and lack of funds, and very few students come to study chemistry because it is unable to provide adequate scholarships. Although it is claimed to be a university, there is not only no classroom for teaching chemistry, not even a special chemistry laboratory. What is more disturbing is that interpersonal relationships are complex and teaching order is very chaotic. Professor William Jimmerman, who teaches general chemistry, also teaches philosophy, while another chemistry teacher teaches medicine and pharmacy at the same time. Jimmerman rejected Liebich for fear that he would compete for his own lecture fees (under the German education system at the time, teachers' salaries were drawn from the fees paid by students), and he did not even allow him to use experimental desks and equipment.

Liebich originally wanted to learn from the experience of France and inherit the academic spirit of his mentor Galusac in Gieson, but the sight made him feel that the situation was complicated. People's behavior motivation is very important, good motivation is the noble purpose, it will be stably hidden in people's efforts, endurance, persistence. Liebich does not want to change his original intention easily. he believes that although chemistry is not a speculative science like philosophy, a real chemist should first think and must have the skills of experimental operation. Chemical knowledge should be acquired through thinking in experiments, and rise from thinking about experience to theory, so thinking and experiments are very important to chemistry.

In the face of Giesen's current situation, Liebich is determined to reform the traditional chemistry education system and teaching methods, and puts forward a bold plan. Its goal is to establish a modern chemistry research institute. At present, there must be at least one modern chemistry laboratory. It is open to all students and stipulates that chemistry lessons are taught in the laboratory. This proposal was so advanced in Germany at that time that it was so challenging that it was rejected by the school board as "deviating from the classics" and deviating from the general direction of German education.

Under many unfavorable circumstances, Liebich decided to put it into practice and improve the existing chemistry teaching little by little. He eats and lives in the school, relying on simple equipment, opened a lively chemistry class, won the welcome of the students, but also won the unanimous approval of the school board.

On December 7, 1825, he was officially appointed as a professor of chemistry, and his salary and experimental funding were also improved. In that year, Liebich found an abandoned barracks on the edge of the small town of Gieson. after some mediation, he successfully borrowed a corner of it and built a chemistry laboratory there. The main laboratory is less than 40 square meters, with a storage room, an oven, an experimental table and a small classroom next to it. Although the scale is small and the equipment is simple, the first step of reform has been taken after all. Liebich takes a chemistry class here and leads eight or nine students to do chemical research, while he lives in a small room upstairs with his wife and family. In this off-campus laboratory, Liebich teaches and studies for 10 years, and many of the achievements are done here.

Liebich is the first person in Germany to combine traditional chemistry education with experiments, while at the same time combining chemical research with technology development, which is an unheard of project in Germany.

Since 1825, he has persisted in practice for nearly 30 years. In order to promote the reform of chemistry teaching system, Liebich compiled a new syllabus, which stipulates that students must go through experimental training to learn the qualitative and quantitative analysis of compounds from experiments. Liebich's syllabus stipulates that he must learn the following skills, such as the purification of natural substances, the identification of the composition of new compounds, inorganic synthesis and organic synthesis, and so on. He believes that only by mastering this series of knowledge and skills in experiments, can we talk about independent research papers and obtain degrees. After the training of the experimental system, the teaching system was gradually promoted to independent research, which not only trained a group of real chemists, but also laid the foundation for modern chemistry education.

Under his great promotion, Gieson has made a large number of achievements in chemistry class and chemistry research. His students have become the backbone of the development of a new generation of chemical technology, not only in Germany, Europe, but also in the United States.

At this time, Liebich's plan to establish the Institute of Chemistry came naturally, and it was finally formally approved in 1833, received the first government funding in 1839, and the Liebich Institute of Chemistry at Gieson University was officially completed. This is not only a special classroom taught by Liebich, but also a place for students to do experiments, it is also a base for chemical research and a workshop for the manufacture of chemical products, and it is also the editorial department of chemical and medical journals.

After the completion of the Liebich Institute of Chemistry, its superiority immediately appeared, not only a series of chemistry courses and experiments were regularized, but also chemistry teaching was organically combined with theoretical research, pharmacology, agriculture and other practical activities. practice also promotes chemistry teaching and broadens the subject of theoretical research. Liebich's reform of chemistry education system and method has brought a series of leading chemistry research and excellent chemistry education achievements, which is refreshing. Gieson immediately became the center of chemistry teaching and research in Germany and even in Europe. Its rise caused a sensation, chemists from all over Germany, Europe and even the world came one after another. for a time, students from all over the world flocked to Gibson University.

Under the new educational research system, under his personal guidance, a group of chemists emerged, including Hoffman, the world-famous founder of fuel chemistry and fuel industry, who discovered Wooze who produced hydrocarbons from haloalkanes and sodium metal. Kekule, who put forward the theory of benzene ring structure, laid a solid foundation for the theory of organic structure and was praised as the "architect" of chemistry. And Voskleschansky, who was praised by Mendeleev as the father of Russian chemistry.

These students go back to their homeland, follow the example of Gieson, and set up a teaching laboratory facing the students, so that the teaching model of Giesen chemistry can be actively promoted all over the world. As a result, the fresh and energetic Gieson-Liebich School was born, and they became an effective force in the study of world chemistry.

The prosperity of the Gieson Lipich Institute of Chemistry in 1852, on the eve of leaving Gieson for Munich, there were already 700 chemistry students from all over Germany, showing great vitality in chemistry education and research. After 28 years of efforts, Liebich not only changed the face of chemistry education here, but even made Gieson the center of chemistry education in the world. He was recognized by the world as the greatest chemistry teacher and the leader of chemistry education reform. He is also a fruitful chemist.

While engaged in chemistry teaching in colleges and universities, Liebich and Weller discovered for the first time that different elements have the same molecular formula. Liebich discovered hippuric acid in the preparation of chloroform and chloral, starting with phytochemistry and pioneering agrochemistry in connection with the growth of crops.

Hippuric acid he believes that green plants support all life. They absorb nutrients from the soil and air, carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, and nitrogen from ammonia. He also believes that ammonia is dissolved in Rain Water, which is absorbed by plants, so plants have a rich and stable source of nutrients.

He has analyzed the ash samples of hundreds of plants and found that they contain sodium, potassium, calcium and phosphorus, all of which are minerals in plants. He believes that these ingredients must come from the soil, and the cultivated land must have a lot of consumption. This requires fallow to allow them to recover themselves. Liebich also suggested that mineral fertilizer should be added before the restoration of farming. Liebich collated and collected some research results, which was published in the journal Progress of Natural Science on September 1, 1840 under the title "Application of Organic Chemistry in Agriculture and Physiology". This achievement has become a famous piece to guide the life research of organic chemistry.

After 1840, Liebich became interested in "the vitality of life" and wanted to study chemically what factors support life and how food is converted into energy. His research turned to the chemistry of organic living tissues. It extends from the chemical analysis of blood, urine and bile to the study of animal metabolism, heat energy, energy source and supplement of muscle motor function, the role of oxygen, food and carbohydrates, fat consumption and so on. In April 1842, he published a paper on Animal Chemistry, which further studied the application of organic chemistry in physiology and pathology. Although limited by the conditions at that time, some misunderstandings, such as the understanding of the fermentation process, Liebich and Pasteur had a dispute for a long time, but in these studies, Liebich improved a number of methods of organic chemistry to determine the chemical formulas of a large number of compounds. He and Weller jointly discovered benzoin groups and put forward group theory and polyacid theory, which laid the foundation for the structural theory of organic chemistry.

Liebich published a total of 318 papers in his lifetime. Organic Chemical Analysis, completed on November 22, 1841, is a classic of world chemistry. His works include Biochemistry, Chemical Communications, Chemical Research, basic Agricultural Chemistry, Scientific Letters on Modern Agriculture, etc., and the Dictionary of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which he co-edited with Weller, and the Journal of Medicine, which was founded in 1831 (later renamed "Journal of Chemistry and Pharmaceuticals"), all play an important role in promoting the research of world chemistry. As a result of this series of achievements, Liebich was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1840 and an honorary member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1842.

In Liebich's era, the world organic chemistry as an independent discipline field has not yet been completed, the organic analytical technology is relatively backward, and the chemical industry has just started. Liebich's series of studies not only established a complete system for the analysis of organic matter, but also promoted the practical study of organic chemistry, and laid the foundation for the branches of agricultural chemistry, biochemistry, biochemistry, physiological chemistry and pathological chemistry. It has also made a pioneering contribution to the rise of organic chemistry as an independent discipline in the world. Under his leadership, the town of Gieson temporarily became the chemical center of the world, and then Germany became a chemical power in the 19th century. Liebich is known as the father of organic chemistry.

When Liebich died in Munich on April 18, 1873, one of his students wrote: "No one has left such a rich and precious legacy to mankind for hundreds of years."

In memory of Liebich, after World War II, Gieson University was named Gast Liebich University.

Li Bichi statue in Munich Source: "365 days in the History of Science" part of the online copyright belongs to the original author author: Wei Fengwen Wu Yi Editor: Zhang Runxin this article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:tupydread, author: 365days in the History of Science, author: Wei Fengwen Wu Yi, Editor: Zhang Runxin

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