Fritz Hofmann

Fritz Hofmann (Friedrich Carl Albert Hofmann) was a German organic chemist, born on 2 November 1866 in Kölleda and died on 22 October 1956 in Hanover. He studied chemistry at Rostock and is remembered for first synthesizing synthetic rubber, a material that later became central to industrial chemistry and engineering. On 12 September 1909 he filed a patent for the manufacture of what is described as the world's first synthetic rubber, which makes him a pioneer of the process chemistry behind elastomer production. In 1912 the German Chemical Society awarded him the Emil Fischer Medal for his research on synthetic rubber. His work is often set beside that of the Russian chemist Sergei Vasiljevich Lebedev, who also developed synthetic rubber, and the two are treated together in accounts of the early history of the material.