Franz Hein

Franz Hein (30 June 1892 – 26 February 1976) was a German scientist and artist.

Franz Hein was born in Grötzingen (Baden), Germany. His high school years were spent in Leipzig, as well as, his college years at the University of Leipzig. He completed his Ph.D. in 1917 on optical studies of bismuth and triphenylmethane derivatives. Hein made Assistant at the University and in 1920 Oberassistent. He continued working on his Habilitation becoming a professor in 1923. With the completion of his Habilitation, Hein went to work on organometallic system electrochemistry.

In 1933 Hein signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State.

From 1941 to 1965, he worked on main-group-metal derivatives of metal carbonyls. After 1942, Hein moved from Leipzig to the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena where he became the Director of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry. War came in March 1945 and the University was destroyed. Hein came back to help rebuild towards the end of 1946. Until his retirement, he held a position as a chair in inorganic chemistry until 1959.

With the reaction of anhydrous chromium(III) chloride (CrCl₃) and phenylmagnesium bromide (C₆H₅MgBr), Hein created a mixture of compounds. He was able to produce what he called phenylmagnesium salts. Hein denoted them as: (C₆H₅)₅CrX, (C₆H₅)₄CrX, and (C₆H₅)₃CrX. However, it was later found that the correct structures were of sandwich compound type complexes and based on biphenyl not phenyl. The discovery of ferrocene and the research done by Zeiss, Tsutsui, and others lead to this structure determination.