Hermann Staudinger (23 March 1881 – 8 September 1965) was a German chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction.
Hermann Staudinger was born in 1881 in Worms, Germany. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1903, Staudinger took a position at th...
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Hermann Staudinger (23 March 1881 – 8 September 1965) was a German chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction.
Hermann Staudinger was born in 1881 in Worms, Germany. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1903, Staudinger took a position at the University of Strasbourg.
It was here that he discovered the ketenes, a family of molecules characterized by the general form depicted in Figure 1. Ketenes would prove a synthetically-important intermediate for the production of yet-to-be-discovered antibiotics such as penicillin and amoxicillin.
In 1907, Staudinger began an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Karlsruhe where he successfully isolated a number of useful organic compounds (including a synthetic coffee flavoring) as more completely reviewed by Mülhaupt.
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