Pyrrole: From Dippel to Du Pont

The preacher-alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel made an oil by the destructive distillation of bones about 1700. He proclaimed it to be a universal remedy. Much later Ferdinand Runge detected the presence of pyrrole, but not in bone oil. He observed the red color of the pine splint wet with hydrochloric acid in the vapor of coal tar distillate, and called the responsible substance pyrrole. He suggested that it might also occur in bone oil. In the mid-1880's, Thomas Anderson finally isolated pyrrole by repeated distillation of about 250 gallons of ivory oil. About the middle of this century Du Pont began to make it synthetically.