Friedrich Wöhler

Friedrich Wöhler (31 July 1800 – 23 September 1882) was a German chemist. He is best known for the discovery of isomerism and the Wöhler synthesis of urea, the first example of a total synthesis in organic chemistry.

History

Wöhler was a student of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry.

In 1827, Wöhler made his most significant discovery. A reaction between silver nitrate and potassium cyanate made silver cyanate, which Wöhler gave the formula AgNCO.

This was the same elements, in the same amounts, as Justus von Liebig had found in silver fulminate, but the two compounds were very different: the fulminate is an explosive, but the cyanate is not. Liebig challenged Wöhler's discovery, but after reviewing Wöhler's data, he agreed that silver cyanate had the same formula as silver fulminate.

Before this discovery, chemists believed that chemicals could only be different if made of different elements. Wöhler's experiment disproved this, showing that different chemicals could be made of the same elements. In a 1930 book. Berzelius named this idea "isomerism", from the Greek language roots iso meaning "same" and mer meaning "part".