Erika Cremer

Erika Cremer (20 May 1900, Munich – 21 September 1996, Innsbruck) was a German physical chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Innsbruck who is regarded as one of the most important pioneers in gas chromatography, as she second conceived the technique in 1944, after Richard Synge and Archer J.P. Martin in 1941.

Cremer was born on 20 May 1900 in Munich, Germany into a family of scientists and university professors.

She was the only daughter and middle child of Max Cremer and Elsbeth Rosmund.

Her father, Max Cremer, was a professor of physiology and the inventor of the glass electrode.

She had two brothers, Hubert Cremer, a mathematician, and Lothar Cremer, an acoustician.

Cremer's father moved to a new position in Berlin and Cremer had trouble adjusting to the new Prussian school system.

Cremer graduated high school in Berlin in 1921 and matriculated to the University of Berlin to study chemistry.

At the University of Berlin, she attended lectures by Fritz Haber, Walther Nernst, Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Albert Einstein.

Cremer received her Ph.D. magna cum laude six years later in 1927 under Max Bodenstein.

Her dissertation was on the kinetics of the hydrogen-chlorine reaction.

The paper was published under her name only because it concluded that the hydrogen-chlorine reaction was a chain reaction, which was still considered an extremely original concept for that time.

Because of this paper and her work on kinetics, the future Nobel Laureate for the study of kinetics, Nikolay Semyonov invited her to Leningrad to work.

She refused and remained in Germany to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry with Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer on the quantum theoretical problems of photochemistry.

Cremer studied the breakdown of alcohols using oxide catalysts on scholarship at the University of Freiburg with George de Hevesy for a brief time.

Cremer returned to Berlin to work with Michael Polanyi at Haber's Institut, where they investigated the conversion of hydrogen and ortho-hydrogen in one spin state to para-hydrogen.

She remained there until 1933 when the Nazi party came to power in Germany and the institute was dissolved for its reputation as anti-Nazi.

Cremer was unable to find work or continue research for four years.

Cremer joined Otto Hahn at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to study radioactive trace compounds in 1937.

She moved labs shortly after to concentrate on isotope separation.

In 1938, Cremer received her habilitation from the University of Berlin.

In any ordinary case, this qualification would lead to faculty positions; however, the Nazi government of the time had passed the Law on the Legal Position of Female Public Servants.

The law banned women from senior positions (e.g. professorship) and required women to quit once married.

Many women scientists and scholars were left unemployed or limited in career prospects.

After World War II began and male scientists and professors were drafted, Cremer was able to obtain a position as a docent in 1940 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

However, she was informed that she would leave her job once the war had ended and the men came home.

Cremer was pleased with her new position and location because she was able to mountain climb, a hobby of hers.

At Innsbruck, Cremer researched the hydrogenation of acetylene and found difficulty separating two gases with similar adsorption heats using the common methods of the day.

She was aware of the liquid absorption chromatography research going on at Innsbruck, so she thought of a parallel method to separate gases which used an inert carrier gas as the mobile phase.

She developed mathematical relationships and equations and instrumentation for the first gas chromatograph.

Separate components were detected by a thermal conductivity detector.

She initially submitted a short academic paper in 1944 to Naturwissenschaften, which was accepted and she informed them that future experimental work would follow.

The paper however was not published at the time, because the journal's printing press was destroyed during air bombardment.

In December 1944, the university's facilities were badly damaged in an air bombardment and after the war, Cremer, as a German citizen, was not allowed to use the limited facilities.

Fritz Prior was one of her postwar students and a high school chemistry teacher.

He chose her idea of the gas chromatograph for his dissertation.

Until facilities at the University of Innsbruck were usable again, he used his high school's laboratory to continue Cremer's research with her.

When the university partially reopened, Cremer was still temporarily banned from work due to her German citizenship and would secretly visit the university in a delivery truck to continue research.

Cremer was allowed to return to her work in late 1945.

Prior completed the research demonstrating a novel method for measurements and qualitative and quantitative analysis in 1947.

It was finally published thirty years later in 1976 at which point it was considered a historical document.