Karl Ziegler
His Life
Karl Ziegler was born on 26th November 1898 in Germnay. He was a keen scientist from an early age, often carrying out experiments at home, and meeting influential scientists such as the creator of the diptheria vaccine, Emil Adolf von Behring. As a result of his extensive knowledge, he omitted his first two terms at the University of Marburg. After serving on the Western Fromt in 1918, he received a Ph.D in 1920. His study led to three separate publications.
In 1922, he married Maria Kurtz and had two children with her. Together they shared a love of art, and would give paintings as gifts to each other. 42 of these eventually were bequeathed to the Mulheim Ziegler Art Museum.
Because of his many discoveries and a patent agreement with the Max Planck Institute, Ziegler became a very wealthy man. He put this to very good use, setting up the Ziegler Fund with approximately 40 million deutsche marks in order to support the institue's research.
Karl Ziegler died in Mulheim, Germany on 12th August 1973 as a result of an illness contracted during a cruise in which he was viewing an eclipse.
Ziegler and Science
Ziegler became a professor at a relatively young age, and his early work aimed to answer the question: 'What factors contribute to the dissociation of carbon-carbon bonds in substituted ethane derivatives?' This question led him on to the study of free radicals, organometallics, ring compounds and, possibly his most important work, polymerisation processes.
In the late 1920s, he observed the first addition of an organoalkali metal compound across a carbon-carbon double bond. Further studies revealed that he could create a long-chain hydrocarbon with the organoalkali metal remaining intact - they could be polymerised. These became known as the forerunners of 'living polymers' - where the ability of the growing chain to be removed has been terminated.
Ziegler also experimented with ethylene and the Planck institute. He aimed to synthesise polyethylene with a high molecular weight. After a lengthy study, he found that if he passed the ethylene over a catalyst of titanium chloride in a higher alkane, he could make these high molecular weight at a low pressure.
These catalysts, known as Ziegler catalysts' were noticed by the Italian chemist Giulio Natta who saw the potential to use them with other compounds such as propene. Ziegler concentrated on large-scale productions of polyethylene and the copolymers of ethylene and propylene. Ziegler and Natta shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the controlled polymerisation of hydrocarbons.