A rival mocked van 't Hoff for riding Pegasus; he won the first chemistry Nobel
When a young Dutch chemist argued that carbon's bonds point to the corners of a tetrahedron, the eminent Hermann Kolbe sneered that he had borrowed a winged horse from the veterinary school where he worked. Within a few years the idea was accepted, and in 1901 its author received the very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff was born in Rotterdam on 30 August 1852, the third of seven children of a physician. As a boy he joined botanical outings and loved poetry and philosophy, idolising Lord Byron. Defying his father, he chose chemistry, finishing the three-year Delft technology course in two, then studying at Leiden, with August Kekulé in Bonn and with Adolphe Wurtz in Paris, before taking his doctorate at Utrecht in 1874.
Three months before that doctorate, he published a pamphlet explaining optical activity: if carbon's four bonds aim at the corners of a regular tetrahedron, molecules gain a three-dimensional shape that accounts for isomers found in nature. The French chemist Joseph Le Bel reached the same idea independently. A French version followed in 1875 and a German one in 1877, when the only post van 't Hoff could land was at the veterinary school in Utrecht. The theory was largely ignored and drew Kolbe's ridicule, but backing from Johannes Wislicenus and Viktor Meyer won it recognition around 1880. It is now regarded as the foundation of stereochemistry.
He then turned to how reactions proceed. His 1884 study of chemical dynamics offered a graphical method for finding the order of a reaction and applied thermodynamics to equilibrium. In 1886 he showed that very dilute solutions behave much like gases, obeying closely parallel mathematical laws, and in 1887 he co-founded a leading journal of physical chemistry with Wilhelm Ostwald. After almost 18 years as a professor in Amsterdam, he moved to Berlin in 1896.
The Royal Society gave him and Le Bel the Davy Medal in 1893. He died of tuberculosis at Steglitz, near Berlin, on 1 March 1911, aged 58, and in 2021 an asteroid discovered in 1977 was named after him.
Source: Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff
