HERZOG, REGINALD OLIVER

HERZOG, REGINALD OLIVER (1878–1935), German organic chemist who described the microcrystalline structure of cellulose. Herzog was born in Vienna. He worked at the Technische Hochschule at Karlsruhe from 1905 to 1912, and became professor of chemistry at the German Technische Hochschule of Prague in 1912. From 1919 until the advent of Hitler in 1933 he was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fuer Faserstoffchemie in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1934 he accepted the chair of chemical engineering at the University of Istanbul. Herzog's X-ray studies of cellulose, together with the simultaneous and independent work by Scherrer, opened up the modern conceptions on high molecular weight materials and fibers. He was a versatile chemist, with a keen and imaginative mind, and among the topics he worked on were dyestuffs, tanning, enzymes, proteins, and diffusion constants. He wrote Chemische Technologie der organischen Verbindungen and edited a handbook Technologie der Textilfasern (1926). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nature, 135 (1935), 534–5. (Samuel Aaron Miller)