Bunge, Nikolai

Born Dec. 3 (15), 1842, in Warsaw; died Dec. 31, 1914 (Jan. 13, 1915), in Kiev. Russian chemist. Graduated from the University of Kiev in 1865. In 1871 he became a professor at the University of Kiev in the subdepartment of chemical engineering.

Bunge showed in 1870 that alcohols, mercaptans, acids, and thio acids are decomposed by an electric current in aqueous solutions to hydrogen, generated at the cathode, and the remaining radical, generated at the anode. (The metallic derivatives of these substances are decomposed more readily than the substances themselves, yielding the metal and the radical.) In 1892, Bunge summarized the phenomena of electrolysis of inorganic and organic compounds and explained the causes for the generation of various products at the anode as a function of the conditions of electrolysis. He perfected the methodology of gas analysis.

Bunge compiled Obzory knizhnoi literatury po khimicheskoi tekhnologii (Reviews of Chemical Engineering Books, 1873-82) and edited the compilation of the Ukazatel’ russkoi literatury po matematike, chistym i prikladnym estestvennym naukam (Index of Russian Literature on Mathematics and the Pure and Applied Natural Sciences) for 1872 to 1890 (18 vols., Kiev, 1873-91). He was one of the founders of the Russian Chemical Society. As head of the Kiev Division of the Russian Technical Society (from 1873 through 1905) and of the Kiev Society of Naturalists, he insisted on the necessity for technical and economic progress in Russia and especially in the Ukraine.

Bunge organized publication of Zapiski po sveklosakharnoi promyshlennosti i teplovoi tekhnike (Notes on the Sugar Beet Industry and Thermal Engineering) and published 33 volumes of Ezhegodniki po sveklosakharnoi promyshlennosti (Yearbooks of the Sugar Beet Industry). Technical schools for sugar refining, road-building, construction, and servicing of steam boilers, as well as a chemical laboratory, were organized in the Ukraine on Bunge’s initiative. Bunge was one of the initiators of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute (1898).