KLAPKA, GEORG (1820-1892), Hungarian soldier, was born at Temesvár on the 7th of April 1820, and entered the Austrian army in 1838. He was still a subaltern when the Hungarian revolution of 1848 broke out, and he offered his services to the patriot party. He served in important staff appointments during the earlier part of the war which followed; then, early in 1849, he was ordered to replace General Mészáros, who had been defeated at Kaschau, and as general commanding an army corps he had a conspicuous share in the victories of Kapólna, Isaszeg, Waitzen, Nagy Sarlo and Komárom. Then, as the fortune of war turned against the Hungarians, Klapka, after serving for a short time as minister of war, took command at Komárom, from which fortress he conducted a number of successful expeditions until the capitulation of Világos in August put an end to the war in the open field. He then brilliantly defended Komárom for two months, and finally surrendered on honourable terms. Klapka left the country at once, and lived thenceforward for many years in exile, at first in England and afterwards chiefly in Switzerland. He continued by every means in his power to work for the independence of Hungary, especially at moments of European war, such as 1854, 1859 and 1866, at which an appeal to arms seemed to him to promise success. After the war of 1866 (in which as a Prussian major-general he organized a Hungarian corps in Silesia) Klapka was permitted by the Austrian government to return to his native country, and in 1867 was elected a member of the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies, in which he belonged to the Deák party. In 1877 he made an attempt to reorganize the Turkish army in view of the war with Russia. General Klapka died at Budapest on the 17th of May 1892. A memorial was erected to his memory at Komárom in 1896.
He wrote Memoiren (Leipzig, 1850); Der Nationalkrieg in Ungarn, &c. (Leipzig, 1851); a history of the Crimean War, Der Krieg im Orient ... bis Ende Juli 1855 (Geneva, 1855); and Aus meinen Erinnerungen (translated from the Hungarian, Zürich, 1887).
KLAPROTH, HEINRICH JULIUS (1783-1835), German Orientalist and traveller, was born in Berlin on the 11th of October 1783, the son of the chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (q.v.). He devoted his energies in quite early life to the study of Asiatic languages, and published in 1802 his Asiatisches Magazin (Weimar, 1802-1803). He was in consequence called to St Petersburg and given an appointment in the academy there. In 1805 he was a member of Count Golovkin’s embassy to China. On his return he was despatched by the academy to the Caucasus on an ethnographical and linguistic exploration (1807-1808), and was afterwards employed for several years in connexion with the academy’s Oriental publications. In 1812 he moved to Berlin; but in 1815 he settled in Paris, and in 1816 Humboldt procured him from the king of Prussia the title and salary of professor of Asiatic languages and literature, with permission to remain in Paris as long as was requisite for the publication of his works. He died in that city on the 28th of August 1835.
The principal feature of Klaproth’s erudition was the vastness of the field which it embraced. His great work Asia polyglotta (Paris, 1823 and 1831, with Sprachatlas) not only served as a résumé of all that was known on the subject, but formed a new departure for the classification of the Eastern languages, more especially those of the Russian Empire. To a great extent, however, his work is now superseded. The Itinerary of a Chinese Traveller (1821), a series of documents in the military archives of St Petersburg purporting to be the travels of George Ludwig von ——, and a similar series obtained from him in the London foreign office, are all regarded as spurious.
Klaproth’s other works include: Reise in den Kaukasus und Georgien in den Jahren 1807 und 1808 (Halle, 1812-1814; French translation, Paris, 1823); Geographisch-historische Beschreibung des östlichen Kaukasus (Weimar, 1814); Tableaux historiques de l’Asie (Paris, 1826); Mémoires relatifs à l’Asie (Paris, 1824-1828); Tableau historique, geographique, ethnographique et politique de Caucase (Paris, 1827); and Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue géorgienne (Paris, 1827).
KLAPROTH, MARTIN HEINRICH (1743-1817), German chemist, was born at Wernigerode on the 1st of December 1743. During a large portion of his life he followed the profession of an apothecary. After acting as assistant in pharmacies at Quedlinburg, Hanover, Berlin and Danzig successively he came to Berlin on the death of Valentin Rose the elder in 1771 as manager of his business, and in 1780 he started an establishment on his own account in the same city, where from 1782 he was pharmaceutical assessor of the Ober-Collegium Medicum. In 1787 he was appointed lecturer in chemistry to the Royal Artillery, and when the university was founded in 1810 he was selected to be the professor of chemistry. He died in Berlin on the 1st of January 1817. Klaproth was the leading chemist of his time in Germany. An exact and conscientious worker, he did much to improve and systematize the processes of analytical chemistry and mineralogy, and his appreciation of the value of quantitative methods led him to become one of the earliest adherents of the Lavoisierian doctrines outside France. He was the first to discover uranium, zirconium and titanium, and to characterize them as distinct elements, though he did not obtain any of them in the pure metallic state; and he elucidated the composition of numerous substances till then imperfectly known, including compounds of the then newly recognized elements: tellurium, strontium, cerium and chromium.
His papers, over 200 in number, were collected by himself in Beiträge zur chemischen Kenntniss der Mineralkörper (5 vols., 1795-1810) and Chemische Abhandlungen gemischten Inhalts (1815). He also published a Chemisches Wörterbuch (1807-1810), and edited a revised edition of F. A. C. Gren’s Handbuch der Chemie (1806).