page_title: Hermann Staudinger
section_title: Early work
hierarchical_section_title: Hermann Staudinger / Early work
caption_attribution_description: English: General structure of ketenes
context_page_description: Hermann Staudinger was a German organic chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules, which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction. Staudinger, together with Leopold Ružička, also elucidated the molecular structures of pyrethrin I and II in the 1920s, enabling the development of pyrethroid insecticides in the 1960s and 1970s.
context_section_description: Staudinger was born in 1881 in Worms. Staudinger, who initially wanted to become a botanist, studied chemistry at the University of Halle, at the TH Darmstadt and at the LMU Munich. He received his "Verbandsexamen" (comparable to Master's degree) from TH Darmstadt. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1903, Staudinger qualified as an academic lecturer at the University of Strasbourg in 1907. 
   It was here that he discovered the ketenes, a family of molecules characterized by the general form depicted in Figure 1. Ketenes would prove a synthetically important intermediate for the production of yet-to-be-discovered antibiotics such as penicillin and amoxicillin.
  In 1907, Staudinger began an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Karlsruhe.  Here, he successfully isolated a number of useful organic compounds (including a synthetic coffee flavoring) as more completely reviewed by Rolf Mülhaupt.
caption: Figure 1. The general structure of a ketene. R is any group.
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