Online Encyclopedia

KARL FRIEDRICH WENZEL (1740-1793)

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Originally appearing in Volume V28, Page 522 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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KARL

FRIEDRICH WENZEL (1740-1793)  , German metallurgist, was born at
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Dresden in 1740 . Disliking his
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father's trade of
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bookbinding, for which he was intended, he
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left home 111 1755, and after taking lessons in surgery and chemistry, at Amsterdam, became a
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ship's surgeon in the Dutch service . In 1766, tired of sea-
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life, he went to study chemistry at
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Leipzig, and afterwards devoted himself to metallurgy and
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assaying at his native place with such success that in 178o he was appointed chemist to the Freiberg foundries by the elector of Saxony . In 1785 he became assessor to the superintending board of the foundries, and in 1786 chemist to the
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porcelain
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works at
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Meissen . He died at Freiberg on the 26th of
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February 1793 . In consequence of the quantitative analyses he performed of a large number of salts, he has been credited with the
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discovery of the law of neutralization ( Vorlesungen fiber die chemische Verwandtschaft der Korper, 1777) . But this attribution rests on a mistake first made by J . J . Berzelius and copied by subsequent writers, and Wenzel's published
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work (as pointed out by G . H . Hess in 184o) does not warrant the conclusion that he realized the existence of any law of invariable and reciprocal proportions in the combinations of acids and bases .

End of Article: KARL FRIEDRICH WENZEL (1740-1793)
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