Carl Friedrich Wenzel (c. 1740 – 26 February 1793) was a German chemist and metallurgist who determined the reaction rates of various chemicals, establishing, for example, that the amount of metal that dissolves in an acid is proportional to the concentration of acid in the solution.
Later Jeremias Benjamin Richter produced a larger table of equivalent weights.
Disliking his father's trade of bookbinding, for which he was intended, he left home in 1755, and after taking lessons in surgery and chemistry at Amsterdam, became a ship's surgeon in the Dutch service.
In 1766, tired of sea-life, he went to study chemistry at Leipzig, and afterwards devoted himself to metallurgy and assaying at his native place with much success.
[1] Thanks to that success, in 1780 Wenzel was appointed chemist to the Freiberg foundries by the elector of Saxony.