85th anniversary of the death of the chemist Fritz Klatte

Dr. Fritz Klatte

If there is a plastic that has the ability to fuel emotions, then it is polyvinyl chloride, better known by its abbreviation PVC. Although the German chemist Fritz Klatte (1880-1934) was not the person who discovered PVC, he did play what was an economically significant role in that he laid the foundations for the industrial production of the third most important plastic in the world today.

PVC is a thermoplastic polymer that is produced from the monomer vinyl chloride by chain polymerisation. Not only floor coverings or cable sheathing materials have been made out of PVC; from 1948 onwards, PVC replaced shellac in the production of gramophone records too. After 1945, PVC was the most produced plastic in the world. And PVC is still the third most important polymer material of all today after polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

PVC was discovered in 1835 by the French chemist Henri Victor Regnault, a fact that is often overlooked. At the time, Regnault was working at Justus Liebig’s laboratory in Gießen, Germany. It is interesting to note just in passing that Liebig paved the way for mineral fertilisation with his research, while his name is also associated with the discovery of the anaesthetic chloroform. In a nutshell: chlorine chemistry was a major area of operation for the Liebig laboratory in Gießen and thus for Henri Victor Regnault too. In 1835, he succeeded in manufacturing polyvinyl chloride by exposing vinyl chloride to sunlight. No-one realised the significance of this discovery, however.

Fritz Klatte was also involved with PVC in 1912 in the context of his work for Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron, that was based in Griesheim near the River Main and that was later incorporated in the Hoechst Group. Klatte was born in Diepholz on 28. March 1880 and trained as a pharmacist before studying pharmacy and chemistry and obtaining a doctorate at Tübingen University in 1907. He started to work as a chemist in the polymer chemistry operations at Griesheim-Elektron in 1908. In an experiment comparable to those carried out by Regnault, Klatte made vinyl chloride from acetylene and hydrochloric acid in 1912 and then used this to produce PVC. His experiments did not, however, give him an opportunity to manufacture PVC in a technical process. Klatte and his colleagues Emil Zacharias and Adolf Rollett came up with the latter a year later in 1913. 

They got patents in different country: Deutsche Reichs Patent no. 281687 (4 July 1913), an abstract of which appears in the Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry (London), vol. 34, page 623 (1915); Deutsche Reichs Patent no. 281688 (2 April 1914); British patent no. 15271 (25 June 1914.); Fritz Klatte and Adolf Rollett, "Plastic composition and process of producing it," U.S. Patent 1,241,738 (filed: July 3, 1914; issued: Oct. 2, 1917), an abstract of which appears in the Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry (London), vol. 36, page 1185 (1917).

Since it lacked sufficient ideas for marketable products, Griesheim abandoned the patents in 1926, thus leaving the stage free for other companies to continue the development of PVC – something that IG Farben, to which BASF and Griesheim belonged, did successfully in 1935. Klatte did not, however, live to experience this. He died the year before, on 11. February 1934, at the age of 53 in a sanatorium in Klagenfurt, from the effects of the tuberculosis he contracted in 1917.

Further more reading in our "Topic of the Month", February 2019:

"A man who was 20 years ahead of his time": the polymer pionieer Fritz Klatte