science · 29 October 1956 · 68 years ago
death
Died 29 Oct 1956 at age 90 (born 11 Feb 1866).
Friedrich C. Hofmann was a German chemist who polymerized isoprene to create synthetic rubber (1909) while working as a senior chemist for Elberfelder Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedr. Bayer & Co. The process was granted the world's first patent for a “Method for producing synthetic rubber” (German No. 250690 on 12 Sep 1909). It began to solve the problem of the high cost of natural rubber as the need increased in the motor transportage age. Hofman had pursued the lead revealed by Carl Dietrich Harries who in 1905 had broken down natural rubber using ozone to reveal that it was formed from long chains in which many hundreds of isoprene molecules are bonded together. Hofman also studied the polymerization of butadiene and 2,3-dimethyl butadiene.
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