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Hermann Staudinger was born at Worms in Germany
on 23 March 1881. His father, a professor of philosophy at
Darmstadt advised him to study chemistry to prepare for a career
in botany. He studied at Darmstadt, Munich and Halle and
obtained his doctorate in 1903. He was appointed
associate professor at the Polytechnic in Karlsruhe, moved to
Zurich in 1912 and finally to the University of Freeburg in
1926. Following work for BASF on the synthesis of
isoprene in 1910, he recognised that the current theories for
the structure of natural rubber were incorrect. The
controversies surrounding naturally occurring large molecules
and experimental difficulties in studying them led him to look
at materials based on simpler molecules such as styrene.
Staudinger introduced the concept of macromolecules, a term
which he coined, and polymerisation in May 1922, in a report
which appeared in Helvetica Chimica Acta.
His ideas were still vigorously opposed by adherents to the
older theories, but he persisted with obtaining experimental
evidence for the existence of polymers. He met
Wallace Carothers at a
conference in Cambridge in 1935, following which he included
polyesters in his studies of the properties of dilute polymer
solutions - from which he discovered the relationship between
viscosity and molecular weight. Towards the end
of his career he turned his attention back to biological
macromolecules and what is now called molecular biology.
In 1953 he was somewhat belatedly awarded the Nobel Prize for
the huge contribution he had made to the understanding and
development of polymers. He died on 8 September 1965. |
