Joseph Wilbrand Research Paper

Joseph Wilbrand was a German chemist who would pave the way for one of the most deadliest explosives. He discovered one of the most important chemical compounds of the 18th century. Born August 22, 1839 In Giessen, Germany, the town he grew up in was about 200 miles away from Munich with a population of 80,000 people. His full name is Julius Bernhard Friedrich Adolph Wilbrand but he would go by Joseph. His father was a German forensic scientist, his name was Franz Joseph Julius Wilbrand, and there's no record of his mother. There's not much on Joseph Wilbrand except for his amazing discovery, he was just a simple chemist in Germany. There's no record where he worked at or what university he went to but based on where his father went,

It seems that Joseph worked on his own, there's no record of him working with anyone, and he took the full credit for discovering Trinitrotoluene. Let's move on to the reason Joseph Wilbrand is so famous. In 1856, 18 year old chemist William perkins tried to make malaria medicine from coal tar but accidentally discovered the first synthetic dye, mauve. Seeing Perkins a young millionaire, chemists all over chased two different goals to become rich, searching for new synthetic colors, and finding more coal. Perkins mauve was a aniline dye ( chemical compound of NH2) so other chemists started playing around with similar stuff that had the same molecular shape. Now this is where Joseph Wilbrand comes into play, in 1863, German chemist Joseph wilbrand found a very yellow dye called trinitrotoluene, as a dye though, it was a mediocre dye, it wasn't very stable, and soon better yellow dyes came along. So trinitrotoluene was put on the shelf, and forgotten about for a while. TNT's explosive capabilities weren't even realized until years after its invention. Its explosiveness went unnoticed because TNT has a fairly high activation energy. Another German chemist Carl haussermann, found In 1891, he could just go back