Justus von Liebig invented the teaching lab in an old army guardroom
Justus von Liebig lived through the famine of 1816 as a boy of 13. He grew up to show that plants are held back by whichever nutrient is scarcest, earning the title father of the fertilizer industry, and he trained chemists by putting them to work at benches, the way labs still teach today.
Liebig was born in Darmstadt in May 1803, the son of a merchant who mixed his own paints, varnishes and pigments. He left grammar school without a certificate, spent a few months apprenticed to an apothecary, and then followed his teacher Karl Kastner from Bonn to Erlangen. Entanglement with a radical student fraternity, and perhaps scandal, hastened his departure, and in late 1822 a Hessian grant took him to Paris, where he worked in Gay-Lussac's private laboratory and won the friendship of Alexander von Humboldt.
On Humboldt's recommendation he became a professor at Giessen on 26 May 1824, aged 21, with a small stipend and no laboratory. When the university senate refused to train apothecaries, soapmakers and brewers, he opened a private institute in 1826. It occupied the guardroom of a disused barracks, about 38 square metres with an open colonnade for dangerous reactions, where eight or nine students worked at a time while his family lived upstairs. Students came from across Germany, Britain and the United States; by the time he left for Munich in 1852, more than 700 had passed through.
His Kaliapparat of 1830, a chain of five glass bulbs holding potassium hydroxide, captured the carbon dioxide from burned samples, making accurate analysis of organic compounds routine. He popularised the water-cooled condenser that bears his name, though he himself credited it to an earlier pharmacist, Johann Göttling. He also proposed a way to silver mirrors without toxic mercury; it flopped commercially because the glass gave a greenish tinge, but it became the basis of modern mirror-making.
With Friedrich Wöhler he found that silver fulminate, which explodes, and silver cyanate, which does not, share the same composition. That puzzle helped Jöns Jacob Berzelius arrive at the idea of isomers. Late in life Liebig backed a process for concentrated beef extract; the company built on it later launched the Oxo cube. He died on 18 April 1873.
Source: Justus von Liebig
