Wallach was born in Königsberg, the son of a Prussian civil servant. His father, Gerhard Wallach, descended from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. His mother, Otillie (Thoma),[3] was an ethnic German of Protestant religion. Wallach's father was transferred to Stettin (Szczecin) and later to Potsdam. Otto Wallach went to school, a Gymnasium, in Potsdam, where he learned about literature and the history of art, two subjects he was interested his whole life. At this time he also started private chemical experiments at the house of his parents.
He died on 26 February 1931, and was buried in the Göttingen.
Major works
During his work with Friedrich Kekulé in Bonn he started a systematic analysis of the terpenes present in essential oils. Up to this time only a few had been isolated in pure form, and structural information was sparse. Melting point comparison and the measurement of mixtures was one of the methods to confirm identical substances. For this method the mostly liquid terpenes had to be transformed into crystalline compounds. With stepwise derivatisation, especially additions to the double bond present in some of the terpenes, he achieved the goal of obtaining crystalline compounds. The investigation of the rearrangement reactions of cyclic unsaturated terpenes made it possible to obtain the structure of an unknown terpene by following the rearrangement to a known structure of a terpene. With these principal methods he opened the path to systematic research on terpenes.
He was responsible for naming terpene and pinene, and for undertaking the first systematic study of pinene.
He wrote a book about the chemistry of terpenes, "Terpene und Campher" (1909).[citation needed]
Terpene und Campher : Zusammenfassung eigener Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiet der alicyclischen Kohlenstoffverbindungen. 2. Aufl. Leipzig : von Veit, 1914. Digital edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf.
^Christmann, M (2010). "Otto Wallach: Founder of Terpene Chemistry and Nobel Laureate 1910". Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 49 (50): 9580–9586. doi:10.1002/anie.201003155. PMID21110354.