Gustaf Komppa

Gustaf Komppa (28 July 1867 in Viipuri – 20 January 1949 in Helsinki) was a Finnish chemist best known for a world-first in commercializing total synthesis, that of camphor in 1903.

While in secondary school in Viborg, Hugo Zilliacus, the teacher of arithmetic and science, cemented Komppa's interest in scientific research.

Komppa furnished his own chemistry laboratory in the carriage shed of his parents' house after the instructions in Julius Adolph Stöckhard's book Schule der Chemie.

He graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1891 and subsequently worked for a while in Switzerland with Arthur Hantzsch before obtaining his Ph.D.

The camphor synthesis was an important breakthrough, especially because he proceeded to commercialize a semisynthesis from tall oil-derived pinene.