Biographical

PDF Biography of Daniel Shanks

I have an extensive technical library, with textbooks of the period 1500 to 1980 and encyclopædias and journals of the period 1820 to 1980. Furthermore, a substantial collection of historical hand tools and machinetools of the period 1885 to 1960.

This site contains a list of the most important people who have contributed to the development of chemistry. It is planned to include a biography with the most important details of their life and their scientific contribution. The list is chronological by the date of birth. To locate someone on the list, the browser's 'find' function can be used.

Queen Elizabeth I of England ascended to the throne in 1558. The last women of sole political power had been a Greek Egyptian Pharaoh named Cleopatra in the mid-1st century B.C. She reemerged in the 16th century as Elizabeth I. Her century is marked by the break away of Protestant churches from the authority of the Pope, whose Catholic authority had been instituted by the sword of the French King, Charlemagne, in the 8th century. Elizabeth was raised during intense religious strife between the Catholics and Protestants. She began her reign with rejections of marriage alliances with Spain, France and English nobles to rule as the Virgin Queen. As Queen she managed to pass a unification act that created a single Church of England that excluded papal authority. Elizabeth, however, seemed to be more enchanted with the arts encouraging the works of Shakespeare.

Unless otherwise stated, the biographies listed below are provided and listed with the kind permission of the The Nobel Foundation. If you know of any biographies of Chemists or scientists whose work has advanced chemistry, that we do not list, please inform us via our comments form.

Joseph Priestly was a clergyman, teacher, librarian and scientist who lived from 1733 to 1804. Joseph was the oldest son of a weaver and a farmer's daughter named Mary Swift. Mary died when Joseph's was six years old, and he was adopted by his paternal aunt, Sarah Kelghley. He attended Daventry academy, and studied under tutors as he developed a strong interest in chemistry.
His most important achievement was the isolation of oxygen by heating mercuric oxide. The gas we now refer to as oxygen was originally called "dephlostigated air"! He shared credit for this discovery with a Swede named Carl Scheele. Scheele was the one who figured out that heating liquids results in a release of gas. It was Priestly who, using Scheele's information, first isolated oxygen.

The ashes of Marie Curie and her husband Pierre have now been laid to rest under the famous dome of the Panthéon, in Paris, alongside the author Victor Hugo, the politician Jean Jaurès and the Resistance fighter Jean Moulin. Through her discovery of radium, Marie Curie paved the way for nuclear physics and cancer therapy. Born of Polish parents, she was a woman of science and courage, compassionate yet stubbornly determined. Her research work was to cost her her life.

In retrospect, the sixth decade of the nineteenth century was truly remarkable with respect to the development of the science of biology. By the end of those ten years all of the pieces were in place for the maturation of what had been a purely observational discipline into one with a strong theoretical basis. The key elements of what would become modern biology had been discovered and formulated. However, it took more than eighty years to bring all of them together (1). The result, the field of molecular biology and its attendant sub-disciplines, is grounded philosophically in a mechanistic, deterministic and reductionist view that derives from the logical empiricist setting in which it was born and which has not changed, despite the radical shift that has come about in the physical sciences.

Ancient Greeks struggled to understand the nature of matter
Empedocles (around 490 to 444 BC) thought there were four original elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. He thought everything else came about through their combination and/or separation by the two opposite principles of Love and Strife.
Leucippus (around 460 to 420 BC) and Democritus (around 460 to 370 BC), supposedly a pupil of Leucippus, are considered the founders of atomism. Leucippus regarded atoms as imperceptible, individual particles that differ only in shape and position.
Plato (about 427 to 347 BC) in his work, the Timaeus, proposes a mathematical construction of the elements - earth, air, fire, water. Each of these elements is said to consist of particles or primary bodies. Each particle is a regular geometrical solid- the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron. Each of these particles is composed of simple right triangles. The particles are like the molecules of the theory; the triangles are its atoms.
Plato's beliefs as regards the universe were that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon move round the Earth in crystalline spheres. The sphere of the Moon was closest to the Earth, then the sphere of the Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and furthest away was the sphere of the stars. He believed that the Moon shines by reflected sunlight.

SIR FREDERICK ABEL (1827-1902), English chemist, was born in London on the 17th of July 1827. After studying chemistry for six years under A. W. von Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry (established in London in 1845), he became professor of chemistry at the Royal Military Academy in 1851, and three years later was appointed chemist to the War Department and chemical referee to the government. During his tenure of this office, which lasted until 1888, he carried out a large amount of work in connexion with the chemistry of explosives.