Erika Cremer (20 May 1900,
Munich – 21 September 1996,
Innsbruck
Innsbruck (; bar, Innschbruck, label=Bavarian language, Austro-Bavarian ) is the capital of Tyrol (state), Tyrol and the List of cities and towns in Austria, fifth-largest city in Austria. On the Inn (river), River Inn, at its junction with the ...
) was a
German physical chemist and
Professor Emeritus at the
University of Innsbruck who is regarded as one of the most important pioneers in
gas chromatography
Gas chromatography (GC) is a common type of chromatography used in analytical chemistry for separating and analyzing compounds that can be vaporized without decomposition. Typical uses of GC include testing the purity of a particular substance, ...
,
as she second conceived the technique in 1944,
after
Richard Synge
Richard Laurence Millington Synge FRS FRSE FRIC FRSC MRIA (Liverpool, 28 October 1914 – Norwich, 18 August 1994) was a British biochemist, and shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Arch ...
and
Archer J.P. Martin in 1941.
Family
Cremer was born on 20 May 1900 in Munich, Germany into a family of
scientists and
university professors.
She was the only daughter and middle child of
Max Cremer
Max or MAX may refer to:
Animals
* Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog
* Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE)
* Max (gorilla) (1 ...
and Elsbeth Rosmund.
Her father, Max Cremer, was a professor of physiology and the inventor of the glass electrode.
She had two brothers,
Hubert Cremer
Hubert is a Germanic masculine given name, from ''hug'' "mind" and ''beraht'' "bright". It also occurs as a surname.
Saint Hubertus or Hubert (c. 656 – 30 May 727) is the patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians, and metalworkers. ...
, a mathematician, and
Lothar Cremer, an acoustician.
Education and early career
Cremer's father moved to a new position in Berlin and Cremer had trouble adjusting to the new Prussian school system.
Cremer graduated high school in Berlin in 1921 and matriculated to the University of Berlin to study chemistry. At the University of Berlin, she attended lectures by
Fritz Haber,
Walther Nernst
Walther Hermann Nernst (; 25 June 1864 – 18 November 1941) was a German chemist known for his work in thermodynamics, physical chemistry, electrochemistry, and solid state physics. His formulation of the Nernst heat theorem helped pave the wa ...
,
Max Planck,
Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.
In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...
, and
Albert Einstein.
Cremer received her Ph.D. ''magna cum laude'' six years later in 1927 under
Max Bodenstein.
Her dissertation was on the kinetics of the hydrogen-chlorine reaction. The paper was published under her name only because it concluded that the hydrogen-chlorine reaction was a
chain reaction, which was still considered an extremely original concept for that time.
Because of this paper and her work on kinetics, the future Nobel Laureate for the study of kinetics,
Nikolay Semyonov invited her to Leningrad to work.
She refused and remained in Germany to work at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry with
Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer on the quantum theoretical problems of
photochemistry.
Cremer studied the breakdown of alcohols using oxide catalysts on scholarship at the
University of Freiburg with
George de Hevesy for a brief time.
Cremer returned to Berlin to work with
Michael Polanyi at Haber's Institut, where they investigated the conversion of hydrogen and ortho-hydrogen in one spin state to para-hydrogen. She remained there until 1933 when the Nazi party came to power in Germany and the institute was dissolved for its reputation as anti-Nazi.
Cremer was unable to find work or continue research for four years.
Scientific career before and during World War II
Cremer joined
Otto Hahn at
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to study radioactive trace compounds in 1937. She moved labs shortly after to concentrate on isotope separation.
In 1938, Cremer received her
habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...
from the University of Berlin. In any ordinary case, this qualification would lead to faculty positions; however, the Nazi government of the time had passed the Law on the Legal Position of Female Public Servants.
The law banned women from senior positions (e.g. professorship) and required women to quit once married.
Many
women scientists and scholars were left unemployed or limited in career prospects.
After
World War II began and male scientists and professors were drafted, Cremer was able to obtain a position as a
docent in 1940 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
However, she was informed that she would leave her job once the war had ended and the men came home. Cremer was pleased with her new position and location because she was able to mountain climb, a hobby of hers.
Gas separation discovery and development
At Innsbruck, Cremer researched the hydrogenation of acetylene and found difficulty separating two gases with similar adsorption heats using the common methods of the day.
She was aware of the
liquid absorption chromatography research going on at Innsbruck,
so she thought of a parallel method to separate gases which used an
inert
Inert may refer to:
* Chemically inert, not chemically reactive
** Inert gas
** Noble gas, historically called inert gas
* Inert knowledge, information which one can express but not use
* Inert waste, waste which is neither chemically nor biol ...
carrier gas as the mobile phase.
She developed mathematical relationships and equations and instrumentation for the first gas chromatograph.
Separate components were detected by a thermal conductivity detector.
She initially submitted a short
academic paper in 1944 to ''
Naturwissenschaften
''The Science of Nature'', formerly ''Naturwissenschaften'', is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media covering all aspects of the natural sciences relating to questions of biological significance. I ...
'', which was accepted and she informed them that future experimental work would follow.
The paper however was not published at the time, because the journal's
printing press was destroyed during
air bombardment.
It was finally published thirty years later in 1976 at which point it was considered a historical document.
In December 1944, the university's facilities were badly damaged in an air bombardment and after the war, Cremer, as a German citizen, was not allowed to use the limited facilities.
Fritz Prior was one of her postwar students and a high school chemistry teacher. He chose her idea of the gas chromatograph for his dissertation. Until facilities at the University of Innsbruck were usable again, he used his high school's laboratory to continue Cremer's research with her.
When the university partially reopened, Cremer was still temporarily banned from work due to her German citizenship and would secretly visit the university in a delivery truck to continue research.
Cremer was allowed to return to her work in late 1945. Prior completed the research demonstrating a novel method for measurements and qualitative and quantitative analysis in 1947. Another student of Cremer's, Roland Müller wrote his dissertation on the analytical possibilities of the gas chromatograph.
Cremer was appointed director of the Physical Chemistry Institute at Innsbruck and was made a professor in 1951.
Cremer began presenting Prior and Müller's work in 1947 at various scientific meetings. In 1951, three papers on Cremer's work were published in ''Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie'', a lesser known German scientific journal. The scientific community responded to presentations and papers either negatively or not at all. Many believed that older methods were sufficient. In 1952, the British Anthony Trafford James and
Archer Porter Martin and in 1953, the Czech J. Janak published reports claiming the invention of gas chromatography.
Martin and his partner
Richard Laurence Millington Synge won the Nobel Prize for partition chromatography, which is often credited for introducing the use of gas as a mobile phase, in 1952.
All were completely ignorant of Cremer's early work.
This has been attributed to the fact that Cremer spoke to the wrong people in the wrong places. Austrian analytical and micro chemists did not focus on gases, so the idea did not gain interest.
Also, in the post-war years, communication between English and German scientists was poor. Following the new reports, the method of gas chromatography spread widely and Cremer's work slowly gained more recognition.
Cremer and her students continued their work on developing both the methods and theories behind gas chromatography over the next two decades and led to many of contemporary, common use ideas used in gas chromatography. Cremer and her group created the phrase "relative
retention time" and how to calculate the peak area through multiplying the peak's height by the width of the peak at half height. Additionally, they demonstrated the relationship between measurement and column temperature and also invented head space analysis.
Later career and death
Cremer continued research at the University of Innsbruck and retired in 1971. She remained active in gas chromatography until almost the end of life.
In 1990, an international symposium celebrating her work and her ninetieth birthday was held in Innsbruck.
She died in 1996.
In 2009, the University of Innsbruck established a program in her name which awards highly qualified women scientist in pursuit of a
habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...
degree.
Awards and honors
*
Wilhelm Exner Medal, 1958
* Johann Josef Ritter von Precht Medal of the Technical University of Vienna, 1965
*
Erwin Schrödinger Prize
The Erwin Schrödinger Prize (German: Erwin Schrödinger-Preis) is an annual award presented by the Austrian Academy of Sciences for lifetime achievement by Austrians in the fields of mathematics and natural sciences. The prize was established i ...
of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1970
* M.S. Tswett Chromatography Award, 1974 (first year awarded)
* Commemorative M.S. Tswett Medal of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, 1978
* Honorary degree from the
Technical University of Berlin
The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...
* First-class cross of the Austrian Order for Science and Art
Museum exhibition
Deutsches Museum opened an exhibition on 3 November 1995 which featured Cremer's work in its branch in
Bonn, explaining to the public how she built the first
gas chromatograph with
Fritz Prior in the 1940s.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cremer, Erika
1900 births
1996 deaths
German physical chemists
Academics of the University of Innsbruck
20th-century German chemists
German women chemists