Friedrich Wöhler made urea from minerals and rattled belief in a life force
In 1828 chemists widely believed organic compounds required a vital force found only in living things. Friedrich Wöhler then made urea, a substance from urine, out of inorganic ingredients. How much that single experiment actually killed vitalism is debated, but Wöhler also isolated aluminium, beryllium and yttrium.
Wöhler was born on 31 July 1800 in Eschersheim, the son of a veterinarian, and as a boy collected minerals and ran experiments in a home laboratory his father provided. He earned a medical degree at Heidelberg in 1823, but the chemist Leopold Gmelin pushed him toward chemistry and arranged for him to work with Jacob Berzelius in Stockholm. That began a lifelong friendship; Wöhler translated many of Berzelius's writings into German.
His urea synthesis became a landmark because it contradicted vitalism, the doctrine that living organisms alone could produce organic substances. Some historians question how large a role it truly played in ending that belief. With Justus Liebig, whose Giessen laboratory he used in 1832 when he had none of his own, he studied oil of bitter almonds and showed that a cluster of atoms could persist unchanged through reactions. The pair also explored isomerism, the idea that compounds with identical formulas can differ because their atoms are arranged differently.
On the inorganic side he investigated more than twenty-five elements. Building on Hans Christian Ørsted's work, and with his permission, he swapped potassium metal for a potassium amalgam and obtained pure aluminium powder on 22 October 1827, later turning it into solid metal. In 1828 he produced beryllium and yttrium in pure metallic form. He showed that supposed metallic titanium was really a mix with carbon and nitrogen, made crystalline boron and silicon, and prepared silane in 1856. He also collected meteorites and found organic matter in some of them.
After teaching in Berlin and Kassel, Wöhler moved to the University of Göttingen in 1836 and stayed for 46 years. Around 8,000 research students trained in his laboratory, and he produced about 275 books, editions and papers. He died on 23 September 1882.
Source: Friedrich Wöhler
