Abstract
THE year 1840 saw the birth of the two Swedish chemists, Per Theodor Cleve and Lars Fredrik Nilson, the former of whom was born at Stockholm on February 10. Cleve was the son of a merchant, Nilson the son of a farmer of Ostergothland. Both of them became students at the University of Uppsala, where they came under the influence of L. F. Svanberg, who had been the friend of Berzelius. After graduating, and teaching chemistry at Uppsala, Cleve worked in Wurtz's laboratory in Paris, and in the mineralogical laboratory at Stockholm; he then made a geological excursion to the West Indies. After his return home, in 1870 he was given a post at the Stockholm Technical Institute, but on Svanberg's retirement became professor of chemistry at Uppsala and held this position until shortly before his death. Like his contemporary Nilson, he did valuable work on the rare earths, and he showed that scandium, the element discovered by Nilson, was identical with the eka-boron of Mendeléeff. It was partly for his work on the rare earths that he was in 1894 awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Towards the end of his life he became absorbed in biological studies. For the Chemical Society, of which he was a foreign member, he wrote the memorial lecture on the Swiss chemist J. C. G. de Marignac (1817–94). He died at Uppsala on June 18, 1905.
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Two Eminent Swedish Chemists. Nature 145, 216 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145216a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145216a0