Lazăr Edeleanu
Lazăr Edeleanu was a Romanian chemist who took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1887 under August Wilhelm von Hofmann, with a thesis on derivatives of phenylmethacrylic and phenylisobutyric acid. That work included the first synthesis of the compound now called amphetamine, which he named phenylisopropylamine; he described it purely as a chemical product and no stimulant activity was reported for it for another forty years. His career was otherwise in petroleum refining: in 1908 he developed the Edeleanu process, which uses liquid sulphur dioxide to extract aromatics from crude oil fractions, and it is the work he was known for in his lifetime. He also worked on oxazine dyes with Raphael Meldola and held 212 patents across several countries.
Compounds
1 credited across 1 class · 1 with a page here
- Amphetamines
- Amphetamine C9H13N first synthesis, 1887 source
Published as phenylisopropylamine in 'Über einige Derivate der Phenylmethacrylsäure und der Phenylisobuttersäure', Ber. Dtsch. Chem. Ges. 20:616 (1887). Edeleanu reported no pharmacology; the stimulant effects were found only after Gordon Alles independently resynthesised it in 1929–30. He is not connected to methamphetamine (Nagai 1893, Ogata 1919).