RICHTER, JEREMIAS BENJAMIN (1762-1807), German
chemist, was born at Hirschberg in Silesia on the 10th of March
1762, became a mining official at Breslau in 1794, and in 1800
was appointed assessor to the department of mines and chemist
to the royal porcelain factory at Berlin, where he died on the
4th of April 1807. To him belongs the merit of carrying out
some of the earliest determinations of the quantities by weight
in which acids saturate bases and bases acids, and of arriving
at the conception that those amounts of different bases which
can saturate the same quantity of a particular acid are equivalent
to each other. He was thus led to conclude that chemistry is
a branch of applied mathematics and to endeavour to trace a law
according to which the quantities of different bases required
to saturate a given acid formed an arithmetical, and the
quantities of acids saturating a given base a geometrical, progression. His results were published in his Anfangsgründen der Stöchiometrie oder Messkunst chemischer Elemente (1792-94), and Über die neueren Gegenstände in der Chemie (1792-1802), but it was long before they were properly appreciated, or he himself was accorded due credit for them. This was partly because some of his work was wrongly ascribed to C. F. Wenzel by Berzelius through a mistake which was only corrected in 1841 by Germain Henri Hess (1802-1850), professor of chemistry at St Petersburg, and author of “the laws of constant heat-sums and of thermoneutrality” (see ).