Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Walter Gircke — File:Richard Adolf Zsigmondy LOC.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy

born 1865 · Austria, Germany · Born in the 1800s

Nobel Chemistry 1925

Austrian-German chemist who founded modern colloid chemistry and co-invented the ultramicroscope to observe colloidal particles.

Nobel Prize work

Zsigmondy showed that colloidal solutions are heterogeneous systems of ultrafine dispersed particles. With the ultramicroscope he and Siedentopf built, he made individual colloid particles visible by scattered light and measured their size and number. These methods laid the foundations of modern colloid chemistry.

Fields

Physical chemistry

Related topics

Adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis

How molecules stick to surfaces and why that sticking makes catalysts work: physisorption versus chemisorption, the Langmuir and BET isotherms, and Langmuir–Hinshelwood kinetics.

Colloids, emulsions, surfactants

Matter dispersed at the nanometre scale: why colloids neither dissolve nor settle, how surfactants build micelles and stabilise emulsions, and the forces — electrostatic, van der Waals, steric — that decide whether dispersions survive.

Chemists in the same field

Walther Nernst (1864)Fritz Haber (1868)Theodore William Richards (1868)Svante Arrhenius (1859)Gilbert N. Lewis (1875)Paul Sabatier (1854)