1910

Award ceremony speech

Presentation Speech by the Rector General of National Antiquities, Professor O. Montelius, President of , on December 10, 1910 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. At the meeting of 12th November, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Geheimrat Otto Wallach, Professor at Göttingen…

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Speed read

From apples to ylang-ylang, the range of scents and flavours that fill Nature’s vast garden of plants are formed chiefly from specific combinations of volatile organic compounds, known collectively as essential oils. For decades the tools used in chemistry were deemed ill-equipped to untangle these complex and unstable mixtures, until Otto Wallach devised ways in…

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Biographical

I was born in Berlin on March 15, 1830, the second son of the royal university professor K.W.L. Heyse and his wife Julie, née Saaling, who came from a Jewish family. After attending the Gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann,…

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Biographical

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on November 23, 1837 in Leyden, The Netherlands, the son of Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Burg. After having finished elementary education at his birthplace he became a schoolteacher. Although he had no knowledge of classical languages, and thus was not allowed to take academic…

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