Biographies | Chemists of the world

Fritz Pregl

-Fritz (Friderik) Pregl (September 3, 1869- December 13, 1930) was an Austrian physician and chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.

Was born in Laibach (Ljubljana) within Austria-Hungary. He died in Graz, Austria. Pregl started his career as physician after he studied medicine at the University of Graz. With his focus on physiology and especially chemical physiology he suffered from the limitations of quantitative organic microanalysis.

The small quantities of substances he obtained during the research of Bile acid made it necessary improve the elemental analysis. At the end of his research he had lowered the minimum of substance necessary for analysis by a factor of 50. He invited chemists to learn his method of elemental analysis, so that the method was soon widely accepted.