His father was the architect,
Wilhelm Emil Meerwein. He originally trained to be a chemistry technician or 'chemotechnician' at the
Fresenius University of Applied Sciences (between 1898 and 1900) before studying for a chemistry degree at the
University of Bonn. After finishing his PhD with
Richard Anschütz he worked at the
University of Berlin, before returning to Bonn where he became professor in 1914. From 1922 till 1928 he was professor for organic chemistry at the
University of Königsberg. The last change in his academic career was to the
University of Marburg. The war devastated the Institute and Meerwein was planning the rebuilding which was finished in 1953, the year he retired from lecturing. He conducted experimental work with the help of two postdocs until his death in 1965. His greatest impact upon organic chemistry was to propose the
carbocation 2 as a reactive intermediate, originally as a rationalization of the
racemization of
isobornyl chloride 1 catalysed by a Lewis acid such as SnCl4. His proposed mechanism for racemization involved a subsequent [2,6]
hydride transfer, which allows the carbocation to be located at either of these two symmetric positions. An alternative mechanism—a [1,2] methyl migration, a type of reaction now known as a Wagner–Meerwein shift—was in fact suggested for the first time by
Josef Houben and Pfankuch. ==Awards==