Julius Adolph Stöckhardt

Life Stöckhardt was born in Röhrsdorf near Meißen on 4 January 1809 as son of preacher Christian Gottlieb Stöckhardt. He studied Latin at school and then became an apprentice in a pharmacy in Liebenwerda from 1824 to 1828. He then studied at the University of Berlin, and worked at a pharmacy in Potsdam. He attended lectures of Eilhard Mitscherlisch, Heinrich Friedrich Link, Friedrich Hermbstädt and Henrik Steffens among others. He passed the Prussian examination for pharmacists and then travelled around Europe in 1834, meeting and interacting with Faraday, Gay Lussac and Jean-Baptiste Dumas. He then worked at Friedrich A. Struve's mineral water factory from 1835. Following this he taught natural sciences at Blochmann's school in Dresden and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1837 with a dissertation on the teaching of natural sciences. He received a position at the Königlichen Gewerbeschule in Chemnitz (Royal Saxon Industrial School) in 1838. In 1846 he became a member of Dresden's scientific society ISIS, led by Ludwig Reichenbach.

From 1847 to 1883, Stöckhardt worked at the Königliche Forstakademie (Royal Saxon Academy of Forestry) in Tharandt. He was the first German chair of agricultural chemistry and developed on the ideas of Justus von Liebig. In 1866, he was elected Fellow of the Leopoldina.

He died in Tharandt on 1 June 1886 three years after he retired from the Forstakademie. He married Rosalie Liebscher in 1840 and they had four children. She died in 1872. One of his sons, Carl Georg Stöckhardt, emigrated to the United States and taught exegesis at the Concordia Seminary of the Lutheran Church St. Louis.

Work After the book of Justus von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology was published in 1840, Stöckhardt recognized the importance of fertilization for farmers and invested most of his time in popularizing scientific knowledge. In 1843 he started to give chemical lectures for farmers. In 1850 he and Hugo Schober started to publish the Zeitschrift für deutsche Landwirthe (Journal for German farmers). One year later, Germany's first large agricultural experiment station opened in Leipzig-Möckern, initiated by Stöckhardt.

His research on fertilizers was influenced by the work of Liebig, but Stöckhardt included nitrogen compounds into his fertilizers. Liebig denied the need to include nitrogen because it was available as gas from air. This conflict escalated into an academic fight between him and the nitrogen advocates which also ended the friendship between Stöckhardt and Liebig. Eventually, nitrogen containing fertilizers became a great success.