Science Sleuth Wins Top Award

A Western chemistry professor’s skill at reconstructing historical experiments has earned a celebrated honour from Germany.

Professor Mel Usselman describes himself as a chemist who has become increasingly intrigued by the history of science. In fact, it was during ongoing research for a biography of William Hyde Wollaston, a prominent 19th Century chemist, that Usselman began duplicating period techniques and using ores and methods from Wollaston’s own lab notebooks.

Prior to Usselman’s work, metallurgists could only speculate on how Wollaston was able to generate extraordinarily pure samples from the methods revealed in his journal papers. The results garnered from Usselman’s studies routinely yield platinum assays more than 97.5 per cent pure, outstanding for the time.

“What I found from that is that by redoing experiments you can learn things that historians can not possibly learn from published works alone,” says Usselman.

As interesting as this work is in its own right, Usselman maintains, “you should be able to answer a good historical question. I just don’t reproduce things because they’re there.”

Usselman continued his research in this area when he met with Alan Rocke, a historian colleague and friend from Case Western Reserve University who had written a biography of Wohler and won the Liebig-Wöhler Friendship Prize in 2000.

“We were at a meeting together and [Rocke] said, ‘Have you replicated Liebig’s famous experiments where he introduced a new apparatus for carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen analysis in organic compounds?’”

However, nitrogen analysis gave variable results with Liebig’s novel apparatus.

“Liebig’s friend Wohler made the crucial advance in nitrogen analysis. He discovered a method of adapting Liebig’s apparatus so that nitrogen could be measured accurately."

“Liebig has unjustly been given credit for all the improvements in organic analysis and the argument we develop in the paper was…that the overall analysis isn’t valid until you get the analysis of each component right.”

In that aspect, “Wohler deserves a great deal of the credit,” Usselman says. “Within 10 years no one was doing volumetric analysis for CO2 anymore, all chemists used Liebig’s method with Wohler’s adaptation but Liebig was given most of the credit by fellow chemists and later historians.”

The reconstruction experiments of Usselman and his students, as well as publication of their results, have helped demonstrate it was the joint contributions of Liebig and Wohler (and not the work of just one) that has led to the accurate analysis of organic compounds.

Liebig-Wohler Friendship Prize

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