Franz von Soxhlet

Franz Ritter von Soxhlet was a German agricultural chemist and inventor, born in Brno in 1848 and died in Munich in 1926. He gained a doctorate at Leipzig in 1872 with a dissertation on the physiological chemistry of milk and became professor of agricultural chemistry at the Technical University of Munich in 1879. That year he invented the Soxhlet extractor, and in 1886 he proposed that pasteurization be applied to milk and other beverages to prevent disease and spoilage. He was the first scientist to fractionate the milk proteins into casein, albumin, globulin and lactoprotein and first described lactose, the sugar present in milk.