In 1901 he became a teaching assistant to Ernst Otto Beckmann at the University of Leipzig, where in 1904 he obtained his habilitation with a thesis on studies of acrolein and phenylhydrazine.
[1] In 1909 he obtained a new habilitation, this time at the Agricultural University of Berlin, where he submitted a thesis dealing with improvements of the Marsh test for the detection of arsenic .
[1][2] In addition to making improvements to the Marsh test, he developed methods for detecting cyanogens in mixtures and devised an apparatus for formaldehyde determination.
[3] He was also the author of biographies on Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Hermann Kolbe that were included in Günther Bugge's "Buch der großen Chemiker ".
In 1949 he published an extensive biography on Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, titled "Lebensbild eines deutschen Naturforschers".