Johann Rudolf Glauber

Johann Rudolf Glauber, who lived from 1604 to 1670, was a German-Dutch alchemist and chemist whom some historians of science regard as one of the first chemical engineers. Born in Karlstadt am Main, the son of a barber, he did not finish school but learned by experience, probably studying pharmacy, and worked as a mirror maker and as apothecary to the court at Giessen before building a pharmaceutical business in Amsterdam. His discovery of sodium sulfate in 1625 gave the compound the name Glauber's salt. He was the first to produce concentrated hydrochloric acid, devised an improved process for nitric acid in 1648, first observed the chemical garden in 1646 and was the first to synthesise and isolate antimony trichloride, arsenic trichloride, tin tetrachloride and zinc chloride. Of his roughly forty books, Dess Teutschlands Wohlfahrt proposed the chemical industries as the means of Germany's recovery after the Thirty Years War. He died in Amsterdam in 1670.