Johann Heinrich Ziegler was born as the son of the manufacturer Emil Ziegler. He studied chemistry and received his doctorate in 1883 in
Erlangen, with his dissertation
Ueber Derivate des Beta-Naphthylamins (
on derivatives of beta-naphthylamine), under the later
Nobel Prize winner
Emil Fischer. In 1884, Ziegler developed the yellow azo dye
tartrazine in the laboratories of the Bindschedler'sche Fabrik fürchemische Industrie in
Basel (
CIBA). This was patented and produced in Germany by
BASF in 1885 (DRP 34294). The process was first presented in 1887 in
Chemische Berichte, the journal of the
German Chemical Society. Although the structure proposed by Ziegler was not confirmed, he was able to develop an alternative synthesis of tartrazine based on the idea that a
hydrazone is the
tautomeric form of an
azo compound (azo-hydrazo tautomerism). This production process was patented in 1893 (British Patent 5693). Tartrazine was initially used as a
lightfast wool dye and later as a
food coloring. Ziegler worked for several years as a color chemist in Basel and ran a company in
Höngg before he became a private scientist at the turn of the century, searching for a universal formula. From this theory, he developed what he considered to be a universal world formula, with which he believed he had solved the relationship between light and matter, color and chemical constitution. However, this was not recognized by science. Ziegler raised accusations of
plagiarism against
Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity, which he later fiercely opposed, as well as against the
color theory of the chemist and Nobel Prize winner
Wilhelm Ostwald. Ziegler became a member of the
Natural Science Society in Zurich in 1921. ==Publications==