William Hyde Wollaston
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- For the English philosophical writer, see William Wollaston.
William Hyde Wollaston FRS (August 6, 1766 – December 22, 1828) was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering two chemical elements and for developing a way to process platinum ore.
Life
He was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, the son of the priest-astronomer Francis Wollaston (1737-1815) and his wife Mary Farquier. Wollaston's father composed and published a star catalogue based on his own observations. Wollaston was the second son and one of 17 children of the Wollastons. He entered Caius College, Cambridge, and there obtained a Medical Masters in 1787, and a doctorate in Medicine 1793, after which he became a fellow of the college. While still studying, he developed an interest in astronomy, and was friendly with some of the important men in the field in England at that time. He also pursued interests in chemistry, crystallography, metallurgy and physics.
In 1789, he removed to Bury St. Edmunds, where he established a medical practice. He was not satisfied with the level of success he achieved there, and in the hopes of improving his chances for a medical career, he moved to London and applied for a position at St. George's Hospital. Another physician was awarded the post, however, and this dampened his enthusiasm for medicine, which he then abandoned in favor of other purusits.
Wollaston was elcted to membership in the Royal Society of London in 1793.
In 1801, Wollaston published experiments from which he concluded that electricity produced from a galvanic battery is identical in nature to that produced from friction, the two types differing only in intensity (voltage) and quantity (strength of the current).
The next year, he discovered in experiments on prisms the existence of dark lines in the spectrum of the sun. He observed that these lines indicate the absence of a particular color in sunlight. The lines are today called Fraunhofer lines, after the scientist who performed the first detailed analysis of them. The significance of this discovery would have to wait until the investigations of Kirchhoff 60 years later.
In 1803, he discovered the metallic element palladium, and a year later, the closely related element Rhubidium.
Wollaston became secretary of the Royal Society in 1806
In the Bakerian lecture for 1812, Wallaston attempted to construct molecular models based on crystalline structure. In 1813, he invented a slide rule to help chemists compute the quantities of different chemicals that will combine with one another.
He was briefly appointed temporary president in 1820 when the previous president, Sir Joseph Banks died, and was succeeded the same year by Humphrey Davy. He wrote a total of 30 memoirs that were published by the society, and several others that were published elsewhere.
In 1822, Wollaston discovered that the cubic crystals found in sulfur compounds of iron and thought to be iron pyrites were actually pure titanium.
Wollaston began suffering from bouts of temporary blindness, which caused the left half of images to be blotted out. This may have been the beginning of an illness which took his life four years later.
In his last year, Wollaston realized that he would not survive long. He dictated some memoirs which were published poshumously. He left 1000 pounds to the Royal Society, the interest from which was to be applied to encourage scientific experiments.
He also managed to published several papers, including one where he attempts to estimate the size of the star sirius based on estimates of its distance from the earth calculated from the annual parallax and on its luminosity compared to that of the sun. He concluded that Sirius was 3.7 times as large as the sun.
He was too ill to deliver his final Bakerian in 1828 and dictated it to hsi friend Henry Warburton, who read it on November 20.
Wollaston was invested as a member of the Royal Astronomical society just before his death, and in gratitude, gave them a telescope that had belonged to his father.
On his deathbed, one of those present observed that it was unlikely Wollaston could be aware of what was going on around him, but the scientist then signaled to have a sheet of paper and pencil brought to him, upon which he entered several numbers and their sum. He died on December 22, 1828, and an autopsy revealed the cause as a serious brain tumor.
Work
Discovery of Palladium and Rhodium
In the late 1790s, Wollston formed a partnership with Smithson Tennant, an acquaintance of many years, to purify platinum metal in a form that could be shaped and used in industry. As platina is a hard metal that reacts with very few other substances, chemists sought after it to form crucibles in which they could conduct their chemical analyses.
But after precipitating platinum from its solution in aqua regia by the addition of ammonium chloride, some material remained dissolved. Wollaston examined this material, and, by a careful chemical analysis, demostrated new chemical properties of two of its constituents. One, palladium, he had discovered earlier, naming it after the then-recently discovered asteroid Pallas. The other, element, Rhodium, he named after the red color of one of its salts.
Drawing attention through a formal memoir to the methods by which he discovered palladium would have forced him to reveal some of teh processes by which he purified platinum, upon which his business and that of his partner depended. Wollaston therefore chose to announce his discovery by publishing a circular in the spring of 1803 advertising the sale of the metal, which he called "New Silver," at the shop of a Mr. Foster, in Soho, London. The chemist Richard Chenevix, hearing of this, soon thereafter procured a sample, and after a careful analysis, especially noting the metal's density as half that of platinum, but unwilling to admit that a new element had been discovered, falsely concluded that the metal was an amalgam of mercury and platinum. Wollaston did not formally publish an account of his discovery until 1805<<<on the discovery of Palladium, with observations on other substances found with Platina, read July 4, 1805, phil trans 1805, p 316>>>.
Anders Gustav Ekeberg (1776-1813) discovered tantalum in 1802, however, William Hyde Wollaston declared it was identical with Niobium. Latern Heinrich Rose (1795-1864) proved in 1846 that Niobium and Tantulum were indeed different elements.
Identity of galvanic and static electricity
In 1820, he performed experiments based on the discovery of Olmsted that a wire carrying an electric current deviates a compass needle. While Wollaston attempted to fashion an electric motor based on this phenomenon, he was unsuccessful, and the feat was left for Michael Faraday to accomplish. When Faraday published his discovery, Wollaston and Humphrey Davy objected to his failure to mention Wollaston's previous investigations, but Faraday later showed that his work was not based on Wollaston's. The controversy generated bad feelings among these scientists for a time, but its resolution left Faraday in a stronger position as inventor of the first electric motor.
Other inventions Wollaston also invented the camera lucida in (1807), which produced an image of greater clarity than its predecessor, the camera obscura. He also invented the reflecting goniometer(1809). The last of these used the reflection of light from crystals of various substances to measure the angles that the crystal facets make with one another. These measurementss are important since the crystal structure of a mineral is related to its molecular structure. He also invented a sensitive barometer which he called the differential barometer, an account of which was published after his death.
Legacy
Wollaston is not a well known name even in many educational circles. His name is attached to the mineral, Wollastonite, known perahps by minerologists and those who produce the mineral for commercial purposes, but not to the general public.
Wollaston was, however, a master of chemical analysis, and this enabled him to discover two elements, which he had the honor of naming, and to establish the existence of titanium in a form in which it was originally mistaken for much less valuable crystals of an iron sulfate.
Wollaston was an inventor and a painstaking researcher, whose analysis shed light on many fields, including crystallography, optics and electromagnetic phenomena. His methodology, once revealed, was transparent, and could be easily duplicated. His observation of the lines in the spectra of the sun laid the founation for spectral analysis, the basis for the discovery of many elements and for the establishment of quantum theory of the twentieth century.
Wollaston used his Bakerian lecture in 1805, On the Force of Percussion, to defend Gottfried Leibniz's principle of vis viva, an early formulation of the conservation of energy.
Honors
- Fellow of the Royal Society, 1793.
- Secretary, 1804-1816.
- President, briefly in 1820.
- Royal Medal, 1828.
Commemoration
- The Wollaston Medal is named for him.
- The chain silicate mineral Wollastonite is named after him.
- Wollaston Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada is named after him.
See also
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
<<We need at least 3 reliable references here, properly formatted.>>
- Thomson, Thomas. 1830. The History of Chemistry. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. 1:247-250.
- Wilson, George. 1862, Religio Chemici: Essays. London: Macmillan and Co. 253-304.
- Drake, Daniel, and Lundsford P. Yandell, eds. 1847. The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery. 7:170-172
- Royal Society of London. 1833. Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London London from 1800 to 1830 Inclusive. 2v. London: Royal Society.
External links
- Palladium Discovery History Uses & Investments
- Rhodium and Palladium Events Surrounding Their Discoveries
Credits
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