1868 | Science
Science
German organic chemists Carl Graebe, 27, and Carl Liebermann synthesize the orange-red dye alizarin that the textile industry will be quick to adopt in place of the natural dye, madder. Graebe will secure a patent on his process in June of next year.
The German Chemical Society is founded by chemist Wilhelm von Hofmann, now 50, whose research in organic chemistry has advanced the aniline dye industry founded by W. H. Perkin in 1857. Hofmann has introduced violet dyes made from rosanaline and will find a way to convert an amide into an amine having one less carbon atom.
Amateur English astronomer Joseph (Normann) Lockyer, 32, discovers a heretofore unknown element in the spectrum of the sun's atmosphere and gives it the name helium. Chemist Edward Franklin has helped Lockyer, who reports to the Academy of Sciences at Paris October 22 that he has found a way to observe solar prominences without an eclipse by using a spectroscope, a discovery made almost simultaneously by French astronomer Pierre (-Jules-César) Janssen, 44 (see Kayser, 1895).
French archaeologist Edouard Armand Isidore Hippolyte Lartet, 67, ventures into a cave near Perigueux and finds four adult skeletons and one fetal skeleton of Cro-Magnon man of the Upper Paleolithic period of 38,000 B.C. (see Neanderthal man, 1856; Java man, 1890).
Baron Jean B. L. Foucault dies of a degenerative disease at Paris February 11 at age 48; mathematician-physicist Julius Plücker at Bonn May 22 at age 66, having in addition to his pioneering work in geometry discovered that cathode rays are diverted from their path by a magnetic field, a principle that will prove vital in the next century to the development of electronic devices.