ROSE, HEINRICH

(b. Berlin, Germany, 6 August 1795; d. Berlin, 27 January 1864)

chemistry.

Rose was born into a family of scientists. His father and grandfather—both of whom were named Valentin Rose—were pharmacists who wrote on chemical and pharmaceutical subjects. His brother Gustav became a well-known mineralogist, and cousins and nephews later distinguished themselves in medicine and industrial chemistry. His was an established bourgeois professional family; and this fact helps to explain the even placid course of Rose’s career, which after the Napoleonic period proceeded without drama and lacked development. He had no need, as had some of his more brilliant colleagues, such as Dumas and Liebig, for scientific entrepreneurship.

Rose’s first training was in pharmacy, at Danzig. The war intervened, and with his brothers he joined the Prussian forces for the last campaign against Napoleon. He was in Paris in 1815 with the occupying armies, and while there met some of the foremost French scientists—Gay-Lussac, Biot, Vauquelin, and especially Berthollet, with whom he had a number of friendly conversations and for whose point of view on chemical dynamics he gained (and kept) a respect unusual for the time. On his return to Berlin he continued his studies, working for a time in the summer of 1816 with Martin Heinrich Klaproth, whom, in a sense, he succeeded as the purest and narrowest German chemical analyst. (Klaproth had been long and intimately associated with the Rose family: he had worked as assistant to the elder Valentin Rose and had become the guardian of his children after Rose’s death in 1771.) Heinrich Rose next was apprenticed to a pharmacist in Mitau (near Riga), where he spent much of his spare time in discussion with Theodore von Grotthus, who had an estate nearby. Rose’s earliest published writing appeared in a work by Grotthus. In 1819 Rose traveled via St. Petersburg and Finland to Stockholm to work with Berzelius. The great Swedish chemist had him continue some researches he had already begun on mica, and started him on the investigations of the properties of titanium, which became the subject of his dissertation.

Eilhard Mitscherlich came to Stockholm in 1819 and Gustav Rose followed in 1821. Rose, Mitscherlich, and Wöhler became Berzelius’ main disciples in Berlin. Rose left Stockholm in the autumn of 1821 and proceeded to Kiel, where he submitted his dissertation on the oxygen and sulfur compounds of titanium. The doctorate was presently awarded. He then returned to Berlin. In 1822 he became Privatdozent in chemistry at the University of Berlin; in the following year he was made extraordinarius, and in 1835 ordinarius. Although he traveled some in later years, his life after 1822 centered on the university routine of teaching and research and on the round of activities of scientific Berlin. He became a member of the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1832. He was twice married. To his great grief he survived his second wife and a daughter by that marriage.

Rose’s contribution to chemistry was a piecemeal cumulative lifelong effort that can be divided into two aspects: (1) the training he gave to students directly at the University of Berlin and indirectly through his great textbook on analytical chemistry; and (2) the scores of analyses of mainly inorganic substances and minerals, the reports on which were published with unflagging regularity from 1820 until several years after his death. Most of them appeared in Poggendorff’s Annalen, in the Berichte of the German Chemical Society, and in the Monatsberichte of the Prussian Academy, and many were translated and published in other major European journals of chemistry.

A bare list of Rose’s papers presents at first glance a confusing picture of analytical results without plan or direction. Indeed, the bulk of his papers consists of miscellaneous analyses of minerals that he collected (he went with Alexander von Humboldt and Ehrenberg on an expedition to the Urals in 1829), or that his brother Gustav submitted to him for analysis, or that sundry mineralogists, both amateur and professional, sent to him from all over the world. There were also analyses of a few compounds of practically the whole range of metals, earths, and alkaline metal earths. Rose also conducted several series of systematic investigations, some lasting several years. He was almost always working on several projects at the same time and thus the investigations overlap. He amplified his first researches on titanium with a number of papers on this element in the 1820’s and one in 1844 on titanic acid. Starting in 1826 he examined the properties of phosphorus and its acids; the reports of this work (twenty-five papers or more) continued until 1849, and ran concurrently with research on ammonia compounds, since Rose thought that ammonia and phosphoretted hydrogen were “analogous” substances. In 1844 he began to investigate the properties of the mineral columbite. That led him to his discovery of niobium and to his classic papers, which continued until his death, on the properties of niobium and tantalum. Intermittently he presented the results of experiments on the compounds of chlorine and sulfur—especially the metallic and alkaline-metal-earth compounds. Information on these compounds was useful for analytical purposes, of course, but was also important because they were central to chemical theory.

In 1851 Rose began investigating the behavior of water in chemical compounds and its influence on chemical decomposition, particularly among the metal salts of weak acids. Berzelius had noted that the so-called law of neutrality did not always hold in reactions involving these compounds. Precipitates from solutions of earth and metal salts by alkaline carbonates, for example, sometimes resulted in basic hydrated salts rather than in carbonates corresponding to the original alkaline one. Rose was able to show the influence of temperature and concentration on reactions of this kind, and it reaffirmed his belief that Berthollet’s insights into the influence of physical circumstances on chemical reactions were better founded than was generally supposed. Rose had found numerous instances of the law of mass, but he made no attempt to generalize or quantify it, as Guldberg and Waage did a short time later.

Rose also contributed about fifteen papers on organic chemistry. In 1839 he briefly joined the European debate on the theory of the subject with a paper on etherification but most of his work in this area was again analytical, although he seems to have been intrigued by the ways in which living things incorporate and use inorganic substances: hence his analyses of iron in blood, silica and iron in infusoria, and the series of papers (1848–1850) entitled “The Inorganic Components of Organic Bodies.”

The Handbook of Analytical Chemistry, first published in 1829, was a modest work in one volume intended for beginners. Demand for it grew, however, and it went through several editions, becoming over the years more encyclopedic and comprehensive, until for a time it stood as the standard reference work on the subject. The seventh (and last) edition was prepared after Rose’s death by one of his students, Rudolph Finkener. The theoretical framework and nomenclature in the Analytical Chemistry was that of Berzelius, from whose general dualistic atomic theory Rose, like Berzelius’ other great students Mitscherlich and Wöhler, never strayed.

Rose the man is best conveyed in the following description by a French student, Adolphe Remelé, who said of the master’s lectures:

He looked upon the various substances that he was manipulating, as well as their reactions, under a thoroughly familial point of view: they were like so many children entrusted to his tutelage. Every time he explained simple, clear, well-defined phenomena, he assumed a jovial and smiling countenance; on the other hand, he almost got angry at certain mischievous [Remelé’s italics] bodies, the properties of which did not obey ordinary laws and troubled general theoretical views; in his eyes, this was unruly behavior.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Rose’s works include Disscrtatio de titanio ejusque connubio cum oxygenio et sulphure (Kiel, 1821), his doctoral thesis; Handbuch der Analytischen Chemie (Berlin, 1829); 5th ed. entitled Ausführliches Handbuch der Analytischen Chemie, 2 vols. (Brunswick, 1851); 6th ed. published in French as Traité complet de chimie analytique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1859–1861), with notes by Peligot; final ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1867–1871); English trans. by J. Griffin, A Manual of Analytical Chemistry (London, 1831); and by A. Normandy from the 4th German ed., A Practical Treatise of Chemical Analysis, 2 vols. (London, 1848); Gedächtnissrede auf Berzelius (Berlin, 1852).

The list of Rose’s papers in the Royal Society Catalogue of Printed Papers is accurate and, as far as is known, complete.

II. Secondary Literature. See “Heinrich Rose,” in American Journal of Science, 2nd ser., 38 (1864), 305–330, signed “D”; J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, IV, 185–190; Karl Rammelsberg, “Gedächtnissrede auf Heinrich Rose,” in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (1865), 1–31; and Adolphe Remelé, “Notice biographique sur le Professeur Henri Rose,“in Moniteur scientifique, 2nd ser., 6 (1864), 385–389.

There is much about Rose in the published correspondence of Berzelius, Wöhler, Liebig, and Mitscherlich.

Stuart Pierson