Wilhelm Homberg

Wilhelm Homberg, known in French as Guillaume Homberg, was a German natural philosopher, born at Batavia, now Jakarta, on 8 January 1652 and dead in Paris in 1715. His father was a Saxon gentleman serving as an officer of the Dutch East India Company, and the family came to Europe in 1670. Homberg studied law at Jena and Leipzig and became an advocate at Magdeburg, but his meeting there with Otto von Guericke turned him to natural science. After travels and a medical degree at Wittenberg he settled in Paris in 1682, practised as a physician in Rome from 1685 to 1690, and in 1691 became a member of the Academy of Sciences, later teaching physics and chemistry and serving as private physician to the Duke of Orleans. He worked at a time of transition between alchemy and chemistry, first on pneumatics and the vacuum with an improved air pump of his own design, and then on matters such as Kunkel's phosphorus, the salts of plants and the freezing and evaporation of water. He discovered boracic acid in 1702, known as the sedative salt of Homberg.