Werner von Bolton (8 April 1868 – 28 October 1912) was a German chemist and materials scientist. He devised a technique for producing filaments for

incandescent light bulb An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb with a vacuum or inert gas to protect the filament from oxida ...

made out of

tantalum Tantalum is a chemical element with the symbol Ta and atomic number 73. Previously known as ''tantalium'', it is named after Tantalus, a villain in Greek mythology. Tantalum is a very hard, ductile, lustrous, blue-gray transition metal that is ...

in 1902.

Life

Werner von Bolton was born in

Tiflis Tbilisi ( ; ka, თბილისი ), in some languages still known by its pre-1936 name Tiflis ( ), is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Kura River with a population of approximately 1.5 million pe ...

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

. He went on to study Chemistry at the

Technische Hochschule 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 ...

and in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

. Post-Graduation, von Bolton worked at the company

Siemens & Halske Siemens & Halske AG (or Siemens-Halske) was a German electrical engineering company that later became part of Siemens. It was founded on 12 October 1847 as ''Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske'' by Werner von Siemens and Johann Geo ...

in Berlin. In 1895 he achieved his doctorate. In 1902 von Bolton detected the benefits of using Tantalum as a material in the production of filaments. Tantalum allowed for a greater luminosity with lower energy consumption when compared with previous alternatives such as coal. In 1905, Siemens & Halske awarded von Bolton the position of director of the first central laboratory of the company, later the Physics and Chemistry laboratory. After 1910, the bulbs with a tantalum filament were replaced by those with a tungsten filament. Von Bolton died in Berlin on 28 October 1912. He is honoured with the ''Boltonstraße'', a street named after him in Siemensstadt, an area of Berlin's

Spandau Spandau () is the westernmost of the 12 boroughs () of Berlin, situated at the confluence of the Havel and Spree rivers and extending along the western bank of the Havel. It is the smallest borough by population, but the fourth largest by land ...

district.

References

External links

Siemens: Scientists and engineers
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bolton, Werner von 1868 births 1912 deaths 19th-century German chemists German materials scientists Scientists from Tbilisi 20th-century German chemists Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the German Empire