A man comes home from a night of drinking. As he falls through the doorway, his wife snaps at him: "What's the big idea coming home half drunk?"
The man replies: "I'm sorry, honey. I ran out of money."
Martin Heinrich KlaprothDied 1 Jan 1817 at age 73 (born 1 Dec 1743). German chemist, who as a founder of analytical chemistry discovered uranium (1789), zirconium (1789), cerium (1803), and contributed to the identification of others. Although he did not isolate them as pure metal samples, he was able to recognize them as new elements. He apprenticed at age 16, to an apothecary. After reading chemistry at Hanover, he settled in Berlin (1771) and started his own apothecary shop (1780). By the late 1780, he was Europe's leading analytical chemist. Klaproth found ways of treating particularly insoluble compounds, took care to avoid contamination from his apparatus, and significantly insisted on reporting "small" weight discrepancies in analytical work as consistent results. He spread the ideas of Antoine Lavoisier. |
