1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Baeyer, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von

BAEYER, JOHANN FRIEDRICH WILHELM ADOLF VON (1835–  ), German chemist, was born at Berlin on the 31st of October 1835, his father being Johann Jacob von Baeyer (1794–1885), chief of the Berlin Geodetical Institute from 1870. He studied chemistry under R. W. Bunsen and F. A. Kekulé, and in 1858 took his degree as Ph.D. at Berlin, becoming privat-docent a few years afterwards and assistant professor in 1866. Five years later he was appointed professor of chemistry at Strassburg, and in 1875 he migrated in the same capacity to Munich. He devoted himself mainly to investigations in organic chemistry, and in particular to synthetical studies by the aid of “condensation” reactions. The Royal Society of London awarded him the Davy medal in 1881 for his researches on indigo, the nature and composition of which he did more to elucidate than any other single chemist, and which he also succeeded in preparing artificially, though his methods were not found commercially practicable. To celebrate his seventieth birthday his scientific papers were collected and published in two volumes (Gesammelte Werke, Brunswick, 1905), and the names of the headings under which they are grouped give some idea of the range and extent of his chemical work:—(1) organic arsenic compounds, (2) uric acid group, (3) indigo, (4) papers arising from indigo researches, (5) pyrrol and pyridine bases, (6) experiments on the elimination of water and on condensation, (7) the phthaleins, (8) the hydro-aromatic compounds, (9) the terpenes, (10) nitroso compounds, (11) furfurol, (12) acetylene compounds and “strain” (Spannungs) theory, (13) peroxides, (14) basic properties of oxygen, (15) dibenzalacetone and triphenylamine, (16) various researches on the aromatic and (17) the aliphatic series.