SCHEELE, KARL WILHELM (1742-1786), Swedish chemist, was born at Stralsund, the capital of Pomerania, which then belonged to Sweden, on the 19th of December 1742. He was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to an apothecary in Gothenburg, with whom he stayed for eight years. His spare time and great part of his nights were devoted to the experimental examination of the different bodies which he dealt with, and the study of the standard works on chemistry. He thus acquired a large store of knowledge and great practical skill and manipulative dexterity. In 1765 he removed to Malmö, and in 1768 to Stockholm. While there he wrote an account of his experiments with cream of tartar, from which he had isolated tartaric acid, and sent it to T. O. Bergman, the leading chemist in Sweden. Bergman somehow neglected it, and this caused for a time a reluctance on Scheele's part to become acquainted with that savant, but the paper, through the instrumentality of Anders Johann Retzius (1742-1821), was ultimately communicated to the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm. He left Stockholm in 1770 and took up his residence at Upsala, where through the agency of Johann Gottlieb Gahn (1745-1818), assessor of mines at Fahlun, he made the personal acquaintance of Bergman. A friendship, of mutual advantage, soon sprang up between the two men, and it has been said that Scheele was Bergman's greatest discovery. In 1775, the year in which he was elected into the Stockholm Academy of Sciences, he left Stockholm for Köping, a small place on Lake Malar, where he became provisor and subsequently proprietor of a pharmacy. The business, however, was not what he had been led to expect, and it took him several years to put it on a sound footing. Yet in spite of his business cares he found time for an extraordinary amount of original research, and every year he published two or three papers, most of which contained some discovery or observation of importance. His unremitting work, it is said, especially at night, exposing him to cold and draughts, induced a rheumatic attack which brought about his death. He had intended, as soon as his circumstances permitted him, to marry the widow of his predecessor, but his illness
increased so rapidly that it was only on his death-bed, on the 19th
of May 1786, that he carried out his design. Two days later he
died, leaving his wife what property he had acquired.