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Featured Biography: Christian Ehrenfried Weigel
Christian Ehrenfried Weigel was a German scientist, specialized in chemistry and botany. He was born on May 24th, 1748 in Stralsund, Germany.
Christian Ehrenfried Weigel
In 1771 he graduated as a chemist and botanist from the University of Greifswald, having studied under Johann Christian Erxleben (Christian’s Doctoral advisor) in Göttingen. In 1774 he started teaching chemistry, pharmacy, botany and mineralogy at the same university. He became the personal physician of the Swedish royal house two years later. Among other accomplishments, Weigel developed a cooling heat exchanger (Gegenstromkühler), which was later improved upon by Justus von Liebig and then became to be known as the Liebig condenser (Liebigkühler), which vastly improved the cooling of volatile vapors, enhancing greatly the efficiency of distillation operations.
The Liebig Condenser
The condenser known as the Liebig type, a most basic circulating fluid-cooled design, was invented by several investigators working independently; however,the earliest laboratory condenser was invented in 1771 by Dr. Weigel. Weigel’s condenser consisted of two coaxial tin tubes, which were joined at their lower ends and open at their upper ends. Cold water entered, via an inlet, the lower end of this jacket and spilled out of the jacket’s open upper end. A glass tube carrying vapors from a distillation flask passed through the inner tin tube, not in contact with the cooling water. Weigel subsequently replaced the inner tin tube with a glass tube, and he devised a clamp to hold the condenser. In 1791, the German chemist Johann Friedrich August Göttling (1753–1809), who was a former student of Weigel, sealed both ends of Weigel’s condenser.
The Liebig Condenser.
The German chemist Justus Liebig (1803–1873) eliminated the inner wall of Weigel’s condenser, placing, in direct contact with the jacket’s cooling water, the glass tube carrying vapors from the distillation flask. He also replaced, with glass, the outer metal wall of Weigel’s condenser and he used rubber hoses, instead of metal tubes, to convey water to and from the condenser.
The design popularized by von Liebig thus consisted of an inner, straight tube surrounded by an outer straight tube, with the outer tube having ports for fluid inflow and outflow, and with the two tubes sealed in some fashion at the ends (eventually, by a blown glass ring seal). Its simplicity made it convenient to construct and inexpensive to manufacture, the higher heat capacity of the circulating water (vs. air) allowed for maintaining near to constant temperature in the condenser, and so the Liebig type proved to be the more efficient condenser—capable of condensing liquid from a much greater flow of incoming vapor—and therefore replaced retorts and air condensers.[citation needed] An added benefit of the simplicity of the straight inner tube design of this condenser type is that it can be “packed” with materials that increase the surface area (and so the number of theoretical plates of the distillation column, see section below), e.g., plastic, ceramic, and metal beads, rings, wool, etc.
Dr. Weigel also achieved notoriety in the field of botany: the honeysuckle genus Weigela is named after him.
In 1792, Dr. Weigel was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien), an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which takes special responsibility for the natural sciences and mathematics, but endeavors to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines. Every year the academy awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and in Chemistry, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, the Crafoord prize, the Sjöberg prize and several other prizes.
Did you know that for Rum biography september.
Dr. Weigel was ennobled in 1806 and carried a “von” in his name from then on. He died on August 8th, 1831 in Greifswald.