[1] Erlenmeyer was born in Wehen, Duchy of Nassau (today Taunusstein, Hesse, near Wiesbaden), in 1825, the son of a Protestant minister.

[2] He enrolled in the University of Giessen to study medicine, but after attending lectures of Justus von Liebig changed to chemistry.

For this purpose he studied in Nassau, where he passed the state pharmaceutical examination, and shortly afterwards acquired an apothecary's business, first at Katzenelnbogen and then in Wiesbaden.

In 1857 he became privatdocent and his habilitation thesis "On the manufacture of the artificial manure known as superphosphate" contained a description of several crystalline substances which greatly interested Robert Bunsen.

He was the first to suggest, in 1862, that double and triple bonds could form between carbon atoms, and he made other important contributions to the development of theories of molecular structure.

The Erlenmeyer rule states that all alcohols in which the hydroxyl group is attached directly to a double-bonded carbon atom become aldehydes or ketones (cf.