Jeremias Benjamin Richter

Jeremias Benjamin Richter was a German chemist, born at Hirschberg in Silesia in 1762 and dying in Berlin in 1807. He became a mining official at Breslau in 1794 and by 1800 was assessor to the department of mines and chemist to the royal porcelain factory at Berlin. He made some of the earliest determinations of the weights in which acids saturate bases, recognized that the amounts of different bases that saturate one quantity of an acid are equivalent to each other, and found that the ratio by weight of the compounds consumed in a chemical reaction was always the same. In his Anfangsgründe der Stöchiometrie of 1792 to 1794 he introduced the term stoichiometry, the art of chemical measurements. His work was little noticed until Ernst Gottfried Fischer summarized it in tables in 1802.