Friedrich Wöhler

(1800–82) German physician and chemist, who became a professor of chemistry at Göttingen. In 1828 he made his best-known discovery, the synthesis of urea (an organic compound) from ammonium cyanate (an inorganic salt). This finally disproved the assertion that organic substances can be formed only in living things. Wöhler also isolated aluminium (1827), beryllium (1828), and yttrium (1828).