Graebe was born in Frankfurt in 1841. He studied at a vocational high school in
Frankfurt and
Karlsruhe Polytechnic and in
Heidelberg. Later he worked for the chemical company
Meister Lucius und Brüning (today
Hoechst AG). He supervised the production of
Fuchsine and researched violet colorants made using
iodine. The work with iodine resulted in eye problems, so he returned to academia. Carl Graebe received his Ph.D. from the
University of Heidelberg in 1862 under the supervision of
Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1868 he wrote his
habilitation, and became a professor in
University of Leipzig. Graebe was Professor of Chemistry at the
University of Königsberg from 1870 until 1877, and at the
University of Geneva from 1878 until 1906. This was a period rich in the development of structural theory and nomenclature, and Graebe is known for introducing the "ortho", "meta" and "para" nomenclature for
naphthalene ring substitution. Amongst Graebe's students was
Vera Bogdanovskaia, an early victim of the inherent risks of chemical research (dying as a result of later independent research on
methylidynephosphane); her doctoral dissertation under Graebe was on
dibenzyl ketone (1892). Graebe synthesized the
dye alizarin in 1868 with
Carl Theodore Liebermann. Alizarin had been isolated from
madder root some forty years earlier in 1826 by the French chemist
Pierre Robiquet. Its
chemical synthesis was a milestone in the development of the German and international dye industry, and foreshadowed collapse of the French agricultural sector that produced madder root (after synthesis became the more economical means of producing alizarin). Graebe died in Frankfurt in 1927. ==References==