Arthur Michael

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Arthur Michael (August 7, 1853 – February 8, 1942) was an American organic chemist who is best known for the Michael reaction.

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[edit] Life

Arthur Michael was born in Buffalo, New York in 1853 to John and Clara Michael. He was educated in that same city, learning chemistry both from a local teacher and in his own homebuilt laboratory. An illness thwarted Michael's plans to attend Harvard, and instead he traveled to Europe with his parents.

At age 18, Michael was admitted for study to Hofmann's chemical laboratory in Berlin, but through various academic transfers managed also to study with a number of other well-known chemists, such as Bunsen and Wurtz. Michael moved back to the US in 1880, working as a Professor of Chemistry at Tufts College.

At Tufts College, Michael met and married, in 1888, one of his science students, Helen Cecilia De Silver Abbott. Following several years in England, during which the couple worked in a self-constructed laboratory on the Isle of Wight, they returned to the United States where Arthur Michael again taught at Tufts, leaving in 1907 as an emeritus professor.

Michael's retirement from academia lasted but five years. In 1912 he becamae a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, and there he stayed until a second retirement, in 1936. From a twenty-first century vantage point, it is interesting that Michael never received a university degree, yet worked with some of the foremost chemists of his day, obtained chemistry professorships, and achieved fame among his peers.

Arthur Michael died in Orlando, Florida on February 8, 1942.[1] His wife died in 1904. They had no children.

[edit] Work

Arthur Michael is remembered today primarily for the Michael reaction, also called the Michael addition. As originally defined by Michael, the reaction involves the combination of an enolate ion of a ketone or aldehyde to an α,β-unsaturated carbonyl compound at the β carbon.[2]

Michael was also well known in his day for incorporating thermodynamic concepts into organic chemistry, particularly for his use of entropy arguments.

[edit] Activities and honors

  • National Academy of Sciences (1889)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fieser, Louis (1975). "Arthur Michael". Biographical Memoirs 46: 331 – 366. 
  2. ^ Michael, Arthur (1887). "". J. Prakt. Chem. 36: 349 – 356. 

[edit] Further reading

  • Costa, Albert B. (1971). "Arthur Michael (1853 – 1942)". Journal of Chemical Education 48: 243 – 246. 
  • Fieser, Louis (1975). "Arthur Michael". Biographical Memoirs 46: 331 – 366. 
  • Poon, Thomas; Bradford P. Mundy, Thomas W. Shattuck (February 2002). "The Michael Reaction". Journal of Chemical Education 79: 264 – 267. 

[edit] External links

  • Henrich, Ferdinand (1922). Theories of Organic Chemistry. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 569 – 584.  - See "The Theoretical Speculations of Arthur Michael" (Chapter 21)
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