Karl Schorlemmer

Born Sept. 30, 1834, in Darmstadt; died June 27,1892, in Manchester. German organic chemist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (from 1871).

Schorlemmer was educated at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. In 1859 he began working at Owens College in Manchester, where he became a professor in 1874. Schorlemmer’s main works dealt with saturated hydrocarbons. Schorlemmer proved the equivalence of the four valences of carbon (1868). He proposed a system of classifying organic compounds and used it as a basis for his textbook Lehrbuch der Kohlenstoffverbindungen (1872; 3rd ed., 1885–97). He was also the author of works on the history of organic chemistry.

A progressive public figure, Schorlemmer was a member of the German Social Democratic party and a friend of K. Marx and F. Engels.