Alexander Kraft

Historian of chemistry whose archival research — a 2008 paper in the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, a 2018 lecture-text writeup in Springer's ChemTexts, a 2019 German-language book, and genealogical work on church records — underlies essentially every modern scholarly account of Prussian blue's 1706 discovery in Berlin, including Klaus Roth's widely-read synthesis of it.

Matters to this vault as the primary historian behind a cluster of claims that upgraded Prussian blue's discovery story from a single Tier-4 Wikipedia source to Tier 1–2 peer-reviewed corroboration — while also being the source, via Georg Ernst Stahl's 1731 book, of the specific "contaminated potash" detail that turned out to need revision. His own 2008 paper could not be read directly this session (its host, ideals.illinois.edu, 403'd every fetch route); only a degraded third-party mirror was available.

References

• claim-kraft-roth-scholarship-corroborates-1706-diesbach-dippel-outline
• claim-1706-berlin-chronicle-credits-diesbach-alone-not-dippel-for-prussian-blue (his ChemTexts bibliography confirms the earliest chronicle document is real)
• claim-prussian-blue-accidentally-discovered-1706-as-failed-red-pigment
• Captures: 2026-08-27 (first vault mention)