Edgar Heilbronner, Foil A. Miller

A Philatelic Ramble through Chemistry

ISBN: 3-906390-31-4
Paperback
278 pages
March 2004

Praise for the Hardcover Edition

1.  THE BEGINNINGS.
   Greek Chemistry.
   Chinese Chemistry and Alchemy.

2. ALCHEMY, THE CHEMISTRY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
   Overview.
   A Brief History of Alchemy.
   Our Alchemical Inheritance.
   Alchemists in Literature and Art.
   Named Alchemists on Stamps.

3. INORGANIC CHEMISTY.
   The Development of Inorganic Chemistry.
   The Discovery and Naming of the Elements.

4. ORGANIC CHEMISTRY.
   Introductory Remarks.
   The Emergence of 'Organic Chemistry'.
   Benzene and the Aromatic Compounds.
   Chirality.
   Organic Chemistry After 1880.
   Polymers.
   Biochemistry.

5. PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY AND CHEMICAL PHYSICS.
   Introductory Remarks.
   Thermochemistry: Temperature and Heat Capacities.
   Chemical Equilibria and Chemical Kinetics.
   Thermodynamics.
   Properties of Gases.
   Electrochemistry.
   Theoretical Chemistry, a Comment.

6. SPECTROSCOPY.
   The Experimental Techniques.
   Understanding the Electromagnetic Spectrum and its Interaction with Matter.

7. X-RAY STRUCTURE ANALYSIS.
   Crystals.
   X-Rays and their Diffraction by Crystals.
   X-Ray Structure Analysis.
   Examples of X-Ray Structure Determination.

8. TECHNICAL CHEMISTRY.
   Some Preliminary Comments.
   Beer.
   Sugar.
   Cosmetics and Pharmaceuticals.
   Polymers.
   Paper.
   Minerals.
   Petroleum.
   Metals.
   Glass.
   Photography.

9. MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS.
   Chemical Education.
   The Anonymous Chemist.
   Tools of the Chemist.
   Elemental Symbols and Chemical Formulae.
   Chemical Societies and Meetings.
   Chomical Errors on Chomical Stamps.

10. Stamp Identification List.

11. Name Index.

12. Subject Index.

Authors

EDGAR HEILBRONNER was born in Munich, Bavaria in 1921, and moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1935. After studying chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, he held a Rockefeller research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He returned to the ETH, where he became Professor of Theoretical Organic Chemistry in 1964. In 1968 he moved to Basel, to assume the directorship on the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the University of Basel, a post he held until his retirement in 1988. He has been a Visiting Professor at several universities and is the author of nearly 350 scientific papers, in addition to the book The HMO Model and Its Application (together with Hans Bock). He was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize by the Swiss Confederation, the August Wilhelm von Hoffman Medal by the German Chemical Society, and the Heyrovsky Medal by the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. He has held several endowed lectureships, such as the Baker Lecture Series at the Ben Gurion University. He is member of several learned societies, including the Göttingen Academy of Science and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

FOIL ALLAN MILLER was born in Aurora, Illinois, but was raised in Pepin, Wisconsin, a small village on the banks of the Mississippi River. His undergraduate work was done at Hamline University in St. Paul and his Ph.D. is from John’s Hopkins University. After a National Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, he taught for four years at the University of Illinois. He went to Pittsburgh in 1948 to join the staff of Mellon Institute as Head of its Spectroscopy Division and later became Senior Fellow in Independent Research there. In 1967, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as University Professor in Chemistry and Head of the Spectroscopy Laboratory, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. His research, primarily in infrared and Raman spectroscopy, has been described in about 100 publications. He has been an editor of Spectrochimica Acta and secretary of the IUPAC Commission on Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy. In 1957, he held a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in Zurich. He was a Visiting Professor in Japan in 1977 and in Brazil in 1980. Since 1950, he has helped present the annual Bowdoin College summer courses on applied infrared spectroscopy. He received the 1964 Pittsburgh Award of the American Chemical Society and in 1973 Hasler Award of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. Collecting postage stamps that deal with chemistry and physics is a special interest, and has authored over fifty articles on this subject.

Reviews

‘This is a gem of a book. […] I recommend it to all those to whom chemistry means more than an academic discipline, but a multifaceted part of human culture, as Heilbronner and Miller so beautifully demonstrated.’ (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews)

‘The creation of an exceptional book must be driven not only by knowledge but also by passion. This book by two chemists, Heilbronner and Miller, is clearly the product of a love for the world of postage stamps as well for chemistry in its widest sense.’ (Advanced Materials)

‘It is the kind of book published only once in a generation. I can whole-heartedly recommend it to any chemist and even to non-chemists who enjoy art.’ (Chromatographia)

‘As a history of chemistry this book would be worth reading. As a compendium of stamps with chemical themes it is a must for chemist stamp collectors. Combine the two and you have a book for all chemist.’ (Chemistry in Britain)