100 years Nobel Prize for Fritz Pregl: from the introduction of microanalytical methods to today’s developments

Abstract

The award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, given in 1923 to Fritz Pregl (1869–1930), a physiologist and chemist from Ljubljana who worked in Graz and Innsbruck, marks a turbulent phase in the development of microchemistry. The paper deals with the prehistory of microchemistry, characterised in part as a qualitative-analytical chemistry carried out on a slide under a microscope. Pregl's aim, though, was quantitative elemental analyses carried out with amounts of less than 2 mg of (organic) material. Pregl influenced many scientific achievements in Austria, especially at the University of Vienna and the TH Vienna. In a radio lecture in 1931, Robert Strebinger, who was involved in the elaboration of microanalytical methods at the TU Vienna, went even so far as to describe microchemistry as an "Austrian science". A breakthrough in the interwar period was the proposal of a special qualitative analysis using spot reactions by Fritz Feigl, winner of the Fritz Pregl-Prize in 1931. The paper is rounded off with selected examples of recent developments in microanalytical methods and of new applications, e.g., in chemistry didactics. Graphical abstract