Carl Wilhelm Scheele

Lore & Background

Scheele was born in Stralsund, in western Pomerania, which at the time was a Swedish Dominion inside the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Joachim (or Johann) Christian Scheele, was a grain dealer and brewer; his mother was Margaretha Eleanore Warnekros. Friends of his parents taught him the art of reading prescriptions and the meaning of chemical and pharmaceutical signs. In 1757, at age fourteen, he was sent to Gothenburg as an apprentice pharmacist to Martin Andreas Bauch, a family friend and apothecary. He retained this position for eight years, running experiments late into the night and reading the works of Nicolas Lemery, Caspar Neumann, Johann von Löwenstern-Kunckel, and Georg Ernst Stahl, the champion of the phlogiston theory. In 1765 he worked under apothecary C. M. Kjellström in Malmö and became acquainted with Anders Jahan Retzius, a lecturer at the University of Lund. Scheele arrived in Stockholm between 1767 and 1769 and worked as a pharmacist, discovering tartaric acid and studying the relation of quicklime to calcium carbonate with Retzius. In the fall of 1770 he became director of the laboratory of the great pharmacy of Locke at Uppsala, about 65 km north of Stockholm. There he befriended Professor of Chemistry Torbern Bergman after analyzing a reaction between melted saltpetre and acetic acid that produced a red vapor, and was given free use of Bergman's laboratory. In 1774 he was nominated by Peter Jonas Bergius to be a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was elected 4 February 1775. He managed a pharmacy in Köping in 1775, and between the end of 1776 and the beginning of 1777 established his own business there. On 29 October 1777 he took his seat for the first and only time at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences, and on 11 November passed the examination as apothecary before the Royal Medical College with the highest honours. Isaac Asimov called him 'hard-luck Scheele' because he made a number of chemical discoveries that were later credited to others.

Reader's Guide

Scheele's significance comes from his astonishingly prolific and important results without expensive laboratory equipment. He discovered oxygen around 1771 by heating substances such as saltpetre, manganese dioxide, heavy metal nitrates, silver carbonate, and mercuric oxide, isolating what he called 'fire air.' However, his first publication, Chemische Abhandlung von der Luft und dem Feuer, was delivered to the printer Swederus in 1775 but not published until 1777, after both Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier had already published their experimental data and conclusions concerning oxygen. Scheele explained oxygen using phlogistical terms because he did not believe his discovery disproved the phlogiston theory. He concluded that air was a mixture of 'fire air' and 'foul air.' He also identified lime, silica, and iron in a specimen of pyrolusite given to him by Johann Gottlieb Gahn, and when he treated pyrolusite with hydrochloric acid over a warm sand bath, he produced a yellow-green gas he called 'dephlogisticated muriatic acid' (chlorine). He discovered organic acids tartaric, oxalic, uric, lactic, and citric, as well as hydrofluoric, hydrocyanic, and arsenic acids. He discovered a process similar to pasteurization and a means of mass-producing phosphorus in 1769, leading Sweden to become one of the world's leading producers of matches. Doctors said he died of mercury poisoning, having spent his life working as a chemist.

Did You Know?

• Scheele preferred speaking German to Swedish his whole life, as German was commonly spoken among Swedish pharmacists.
• He discovered oxygen around 1771, but his publication was delayed until 1777, after Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier had already published their findings.
• Isaac Asimov called him 'hard-luck Scheele' because he made a number of chemical discoveries that were later credited to others.
• He discovered a process similar to pasteurization and a means of mass-producing phosphorus in 1769, leading Sweden to become a leading producer of matches.
• Doctors said he died of mercury poisoning, having spent his life working as a chemist.

From Apprentice to Prolific Discoverer

Carl Wilhelm Scheele's path into chemistry began not in a university lecture hall but in the world of his family's trade. Born in 1742 in Stralsund, a Pomeranian town then under Swedish dominion, he was the son of a grain dealer and brewer. Friends of his parents introduced him to reading prescriptions and interpreting pharmaceutical symbols, and by 1757, at just fourteen, he was apprenticed to the apothecary Martin Andreas Bauch in Gothenburg. He remained there for eight years, spending late nights running experiments and devouring the works of Lemery, Neumann, Löwenstern-Kunckel, and Stahl. His career then moved through Malmö, where he met the future professor Anders Jahan Retzius, and into Stockholm, where he identified tartaric acid. By the autumn of 1770 he directed the laboratory at Locke's pharmacy in Uppsala, a post that placed him in close contact with the chemist Torbern Bergman. Over the following years he established his own pharmacy in Köping and, outside his commercial duties, produced a remarkable catalogue of discoveries: the elements molybdenum, tungsten, barium, nitrogen, and chlorine, along with organic acids including oxalic, uric, lactic, and citric, plus hydrofluoric, hydrocyanic, and arsenic acids.

The Fire-Air That Wasn't His to Claim

The story of Scheele's oxygen discovery is inseparable from the story of its delayed publication. In 1770, Bergman brought him a puzzling reaction: melted saltpetre treated with acetic acid released a red vapour that neither Bergman nor his assistant Gahn could explain. Scheele's analysis of that reaction set him on the path to isolating what he called "fire air." He heated a range of substances—saltpetre, manganese dioxide, heavy metal nitrates, silver carbonate, mercuric oxide—and each time the same gas emerged. His manuscript, Chemische Abhandlung von der Luft und dem Feuer, was handed to the printer Swederus in 1775, yet it did not appear in print until 1777. By then Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier had already published their own data and conclusions about the gas and the combustion process. The first English edition, Chemical Observation and Experiments on Air and Fire, finally reached readers in 1780. Isaac Asimov later dubbed him "hard-luck Scheele," a label that captures the bitter irony of a man who isolated the gas before his rivals but watched the credit slip away through a two-year printing delay.

Working Inside the Phlogiston World

Scheele never escaped the intellectual framework of his era. As a teenager he absorbed the phlogiston theory, which held that a substance called "matter of fire" was expelled from any material during combustion and that burning ceased once that phlogiston was spent. When he isolated his "fire air," he described it entirely in phlogistical language: the gas supported combustion because it combined with phlogiston in heated substances. He did not believe his findings overturned the theory. He also concluded that ordinary air was not a single element but a blend of two gases—his "fire air" and a "foul air" that did not support burning. What makes his position remarkable is that, despite lacking the expensive apparatus available to Lavoisier in Paris, he produced results of extraordinary precision. His meticulous gas work, even wrapped in outdated terminology, supplied the experimental evidence that ultimately helped the chemical community dismantle phlogiston and move toward the standardized, procedure-based discipline that Lavoisier, Priestley, and Scheele collectively helped build.

A German in Sweden, and a Life Cut Short

Scheele's personal identity was shaped by a small but persistent linguistic choice: he spoke German rather than Swedish for his entire adult life, a habit rooted in the fact that German was the common tongue among Swedish pharmacists. His social and professional circles were wide—Retzius in Lund, Bergman in Uppsala, and in Stockholm figures such as Abraham Bäck, Peter Jonas Bergius, Bengt Bergius, and Carl Friedrich von Schultzenheim all crossed his path. His formal recognition came in fits and starts: nominated by Bergius in 1774, elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in February 1775, yet he attended only a single Academy meeting on 29 October 1777. That same month he sat the apothecary examination before the Royal Medical College and passed with the highest honours. After returning to Köping he balanced his pharmacy with a long series of research papers. His life ended on 21 May 1786; physicians attributed his death to mercury poisoning, a fitting and grim coda for a man who had spent decades breathing in the fumes of his own experiments.