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Edward Frankland

Hermann Kolbe
http://wn.com/Hermann_Kolbe
John Tyndall
John Tyndall FRS (2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was a prominent 19th century physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he studied thermal radiation, and produced a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere. Tyndall published seventeen books, which brought state-of-the-art 19th century experimental physics to a wider audience. From 1853 to 1887 he was professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where he became the successor to positions held by Michael Faraday.
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Justus Liebig
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Norman Lockyer
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, FRS (17 May 1836 – 16 August 1920), known simply as Norman Lockyer, was an English scientist and astronomer. Along with the French scientist Pierre Janssen he is credited with discovering the gas helium. Lockyer also is remembered for being the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature.
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Percy Frankland
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Robert Bunsen
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (30 March 1811 – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and with Gustav Kirchhoff discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861). Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use. The Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and Kirchhoff.
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Lancaster, England
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Norway
Norway (; Norwegian: (Bokmål) or (Nynorsk)), officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe occupying the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, as well as Jan Mayen and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.8 million. It is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. The majority of the country shares a border to the east with Sweden; its northernmost region is bordered by Finland to the south and Russia to the east; and Denmark lies south of its southern tip across the Skagerrak Strait. The capital city of Norway is Oslo. Norway's extensive coastline, facing the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea, is home to its famous fjords.
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Reigate
Reigate () is a historic market town in Surrey, England at the foot of the North Downs, and in the London commuter belt. It is one of the main constituents of the Borough of Reigate and Banstead. Reigate and the adjacent town of Redhill form a single urban area.
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Royal Institution
The Royal Institution of Great Britain (often abbreviated as the Royal Institution or RI) is an organization devoted to scientific education and research, based in London.
http://wn.com/Royal_Institution

Edward Frankland

Sir Edward Frankland, KCB, FRS (18 January 1825 – 9 August 1899) was a chemist, one of the foremost of his day. He was an expert in water quality and analysis, and originated the concept of combining power, or valence, in chemistry. He was also one of the originators of organometallic chemistry.

Biography

Edward Frankland was born in Lancaster, England. After attending Lancaster Royal Grammar School, he spent six years as an apprentice to a druggist in that town. In 1845 he became an assistant at the chemical laboratory of the British Geological Survey in London. The laboratory was directed by Lyon Playfair, who had been a chemistry student of Justus Liebig in Germany. In summer 1847 Frankland visited Germany and met some of Playfair's chemistry contacts there, including Robert Bunsen. In August 1847 Frankland accepted a post as science-master at a boarding school in Hampshire, but the following summer he opted to return to Germany to be a fulltime student at the University of Marburg. Robert Bunsen was an influential teacher at Marburg at the time, and Bunsen's reputation was one of the main attractions for Frankland. The following year Frankland accepted an invitation to move to Justus Liebig's laboratory at Giessen. By this stage Frankland already had his own research agenda and had published some original research in chemistry. In January 1850 Lyon Playfair revealed his intention to resign from his professorship at Putney College of Civil Engineering in London and arrange to have Frankland become his successor. Hence Frankland abruptly terminated his studies in Germany and returned to take up Playfair's former position in England. A year later Frankland became professor of chemistry at a newly established school now known as the University of Manchester. In 1857 he became lecturer in chemistry at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and in 1863 professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, London. For two decades Frankland also had a teaching role at the Royal School of Mines in London.

Edward Frankland was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853 and awarded the Society's Royal Medal in 1857 and its Copley Medal in 1894. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1897. He died while on a holiday in Norway, and was buried near his home in Reigate, Surrey.

His son Percy Frankland was also a noted chemist and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Scientific work

From an early age, Frankland engaged in original research with great success. Analytical problems, such as the isolation of certain organic radicals, attracted his attention at first, but he soon turned to chemical syntheses, and he was only about twenty-five years of age when an investigation, doubtless suggested by the work of his master, Robert Bunsen and Hermann Kolbe, on cacodyl, yielded the interesting discovery of organometallic compounds. After his return to England he achieved the synthesis of diethylzinc and dimethylzinc by the reaction of ethyl iodide and methyl iodide with metallic zinc.

The theoretical deductions Frankland drew from considering these bodies were even more interesting and important than the bodies themselves. Perceiving a molecular isonomy between them and the inorganic compounds of the metals from which they may be formed, Frankland saw their true molecular type in the oxygen, sulfur or chlorine compounds of those metals, from which he held them to be derived by the substitution of an organic group for the oxygen, sulfur, &c.; In this way they enabled him to overthrow the theory of conjugate compounds, and they further led him in 1852 to publish the conception that the atoms of each elementary substance have a definite saturation capacity, so that they can only combine with a certain limited number of the atoms of other elements. The theory of valency thus founded has dominated the subsequent development of chemical doctrine, and forms the groundwork upon which the fabric of modern structural chemistry reposes.

In applied chemistry Frankland's great work was in connection with water-supply. Appointed a member of the second royal commission on the pollution of rivers in 1868, he was provided by the government with a completely-equipped laboratory, in which, for a period of six years, he carried on the inquiries necessary for the purposes of that body, and was thus the means of bringing to light an enormous amount of valuable information respecting the contamination of rivers by sewage, trade-refuse, &c.;, and the purification of water for domestic use. In 1865, when he succeeded August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the School of Mines, he undertook the duty of making monthly reports to the registrar-general on the character of the water supplied to London, and these he continued down to the end of his life. At one time he was an unsparing critic of its quality, but in later years he became strongly convinced of its general excellence and wholesomeness.

Frankland's analyses were both chemical and bacteriological, and his dissatisfaction with the processes in vogue for the former at the time of his appointment caused him to spend two years in devising new and more accurate methods. In 1859 Frankland passed a night on the very top of Mont Blanc in company with John Tyndall. One of the purposes of the expedition was to discover whether the rate of combustion of a candle varies with the density of the atmosphere in which it is burnt, a question which was answered in the negative. Other observations made by Frankland at the time formed the starting-point of a series of experiments which yielded far-reaching results. He noticed that at the summit the candle gave a very poor light, and was thereby led to investigate the effect produced on luminous flames by varying the pressure of the atmosphere in which they are burning. He found that pressure increases luminosity, so that hydrogen, for example, the flame of which gives no light in normal circumstances, burns with a luminous flame under a pressure of ten or twenty atmospheres, and the inference he drew was that the presence of solid particles is not the only factor that determines the light-giving power of a flame, Further, he showed that the spectrum of a dense ignited gas resembles that of an incandescent liquid or solid, and he traced a gradual change in the spectrum of an incandescent gas under increasing pressure, the sharp lines observable when it is extremely attenuated broadening out to nebulous bands as the pressure rises, till they merge in the continuous spectrum as the gas approaches a density comparable with that of the liquid state. An application of these results to solar physics in conjunction with Sir Norman Lockyer led to the view that at least the external layers of the sun cannot consist of matter in the liquid or solid forms, but must be composed of gases or vapours.

Frankland and Lockyer were also the discoverers of helium, along with Pierre Jules César Janssen. In 1868 they noticed, in the solar spectrum, a bright yellow line which did not correspond to any substance then known. It was this line which they attributed to the then hypothetical element, helium. This was the first time an element was discovered on an extraterrestrial world before being found on the earth.

Bibliography

Ueber die Isolirung des Aethyls. Inaugural-Dissertation, welche mit Genehmigung der philosophischen Facultät zu Marburg zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde einreicht Edward Frankland aus Lancaster. Marburg, 1849. Druck von George Westermann in Braunschweig. [45 pages].

How to teach chemistry by Edward Frankland (1875)

Water analysis for sanitary purposes by Edward Frankland (1880)

References

External links

Brief biography with census records

Obituary from The Times

Dictionary of National Biography (1901) entry for Edward Frankland

Audio program, and transcript, about Frankland

Publisher's blurb for a book-length biography of Frankland published in 2003

Category:1825 births Category:1899 deaths Category:British chemists Category:Alumni of the Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital Category:Academics of the Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital Category:Old Lancastrians Category:Academics of Imperial College London Category:University of Marburg alumni Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath Category:People from Lancaster, Lancashire Category:Recipients of the Copley Medal Category:Royal Medal winners Category:Presenters of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

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