Augustus George Vernon Harcourt

Augustus George Vernon Harcourt

Alice meets the White Knight. Illustration by John Tenniel in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There from 1870.

Augustus George Vernon Harcourt (born December 24, 1834 in London , † August 23, 1919 in St Clare, near Ryde ) was a British chemist who was one of the founders of chemical kinetics . He was - at least in part - the model for the figure of the White Knight in Lewis Carroll's children 's book Alice Behind the Looking Glass .

Live and act

Family and personal life

Augustus George Vernon Harcourt was the older son of Admiral Frederick Edward Vernon Harcourt (1790-1883) and his wife Marcia († 1868), sister of John Jervis Tollemache, 1st Baron Tollemache (1805-1890). His grandfather was Edward Harcourt (1757-1847), Archbishop of York and his uncle William Vernon Harcourt (1789-1871), who is considered the founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science .

Harcourt was close friends with Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll . They spent a lot of time together with the children of Benjamin Collins Brodie and Henry George Liddell , including Alice Liddell . He was - at least in part - the model for the figure of the White Knight in Carroll's children's book Alice Behind the Mirrors .

In 1872 he married Rachel Mary Bruce (1848-1927), a daughter of Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare , with whom he had two sons and eight daughters, including Janet Vernon Harcourt (1879-1966).

Education and professional career

Augustus George Vernon Harcourt was initially taught at the Cheam and Harrow Schools . From 1854 he continued his education at Balliol College in Oxford , where the mathematician Henry John Stephen Smith was one of his teachers. After Benjamin Collins Brodie Jr. 1855 his teaching had taken as a professor of chemistry, Harcourt soon became his assistant in which he in 1859 received his doctorate . When Brodie moved to the newly founded Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 1858 , Harcourt followed him as a lecture assistant. In 1859, Harcourt was elected Dr Lee's chemistry reader, named after Matthew Lee (1695–1755), and a senior student at Christ Church. He held both positions until 1902, when he retired.

Harcourt taught some later important chemists, for example Harold Baily Dixon (1852-1930), David Leonard Chapman (1869-1958) and Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (1873-1952).

Research areas

In the early 1860s, Harcourt began to study the speed of chemical reactions . He looked for responses where he could accurately measure the amount of change over a period of time. Harcourt concentrated on a reaction of oxalic acid , potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid as well as between hydrogen peroxide and hydrogen iodide in an acidic solution that proved to be easier to handle. In collaboration with the mathematician William Esson , Harcourt was able to formulate the law of mass action in its simplest form in 1866 independently of Cato Maximilian Guldberg and Peter Waage . In 1912 the two worked together again to determine the influence of temperature on the rate of reaction, but were not very successful. However, a notable result of this collaboration was the prediction of a temperature at which any chemical reaction would stop. The temperature they gave was −272.6  ° C , which corresponds fairly well with absolute zero (0  K corresponds to −273.15 ° C).

In the field of applied chemistry, Harcourt, who had been appointed one of the three advisors to the London Municipal Gas Works in 1872, was busy investigating the purity of town gas . For this he developed, among other things, a sulfur test . He also invented a pentane lamp, which replaced the Walrat candles previously used as the standard light source for measurements. In 1899 Harcourt developed a method for determining the concentration of chloroform . He became an adviser to the British Medical Association and devised a simple, portable inhaler for chloroform anesthesia that was put into practical use for some time.

Memberships

Harcourt was inducted into the Chemical Society in 1859 . From 1865 to 1873 he was one of its secretaries and in 1895 President of the Chemical Society. On June 4, 1868, Harcourt was accepted as a member of the Royal Society . From 1878 to 1880 he served on the company's council. Together with William Esson , he gave the Baker Lecture on May 9, 1895 . Early on he attended the meetings of the British Association and made numerous contributions to the chemical section, of which he was president in 1875. A few years later, Harcourt was elected one of the British Association's General Secretaries. He held this office for 14 years.

Fonts (selection)

Harcourt's chloroform regulator and his pentane air lamp

Books

• Exercises in Practical Chemistry . 1st edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1869 ( online ) with Henry George Madan (1838–1901)

Magazine articles

• On the Peroxides of Potassium and Sodium . In: Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society of London . Volume 14, 1862, pp. 267-290 ( doi: 10.1039 / QJ8621400267 ).
• On a Method for the Determination of Nitric and Nitrous Acids . In: Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society of London . Volume 15, 1862, pp. 381-386 ( doi: 10.1039 / JS8621500381 ).
• On the rate of chemical change . In: Chemical news and journal of physical science . Volume 10, 1864, pp. 171-173 ( online ).
• On the Laws of Connexion between the Conditions of a Chemical Change and Its Amount . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society . Volume 14, 1865, pp. 470-474 ( doi: 10.1098 / rspl.1865.0080 ). - with William Esson
• On the Laws of Connexion between the Conditions of a Chemical Change and Its Amount . In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . Volume 156, 1866, pp. 193-221 ( doi: 10.1098 / rstl.1866.0010 ) - with William Esson
• On the Observation of the Course of Chemical Change . In: Journal of the Chemical Society . Volume 20, 1867, pp. 460-492 ( doi: 10.1039 / JS8672000460 ).
• On the rate at which chemical actions take place . In: Chemical news and journal of physical science , Volume 18, Number 449, 1868, pp. 13-14 ( online ).
• On a Continuous Process for Purifying Coal Gas from Sulfuretted Hydrogen and Ammonia, and for Extracting Sulfur and Ammoniacal Salts . In Chemical news and journal of industrial science . Volume 28, number 723, 1873, p. 175 ( online ). - with Frederick William Fison, 1st Baronet (1847–1927)
• Bakerian Lecture: On the Laws of Connexion between the Conditions of Chemical Change and Its Amount . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society . Volume 58, number 347-352, 1895, pp. 108-113 ( doi: 10.1098 / rspl.1895.0014 ).
• On a Method for Providing a Current of Gaseous Chloroform mixed with Air in any desired proportion, and on Methods for Estimating the Gaseous Chloroform in the Mixtures . In: Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions . Volume 75, 1899, pp. 1060-1066 ( doi: 10.1039 / CT8997501060 ).
• Observations on the Phenomena and Products of Decomposition when Normal Cupric Acetate is Heated . In: Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions . Volume 81, 1902, pp. 1385-1402 ( doi: 10.1039 / CT9028101385 ). - with Andrea Angel (1877–1917)
• The Oxford Museum and its Founders . In: The Cornhill Magazine . Volume 28, 1910, pp. 350-363 ( online ).
• A Method for the Approximate Estimation of Small Quantities of Lead . In: Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions . Volume 97, 1910, pp. 841-845 ( doi: 10.1039 / CT9109700841 ).
• The Alleged Complexity of Tellurium . In: Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions . Volume 99, 1911, pp. 1311-1313 ( doi: 10.1039 / CT9119901311 ) - with Herbert Brereton Baker .
• On the Variation with Temperature of the Rate of a Chemical Change . In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A . Volume 212, number 484-496, 1913, pp. 187-204 ( doi: 10.1098 / rsta.1913.0006 ). - with William Esson

literature

Biographical abstracts

• Edward E. Daub: Harcourt, AG Vernon . In: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography . Volume 6, Charles Scribner's Sons, Detroit 2008. pp. 109-110 (online) .
• HB Dixon, rev. Keith J. Laidler: Harcourt, Augustus George Vernon (1834-1919). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Volume 25: Hanbury – Hay. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861375-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), As of 2004, accessed September 13, 2012.
• HBD: Obituary notices: Augustus George Vernon Harcourt, 1834-1919 . In: Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions . Volume 117, 1920, pp. 1626-1631 ( doi: 10.1039 / CT9201701626 ).
• [Anonymous]: Augustus George Vernon-Harcourt, 1834–1919 . In: Nature . Volume 134, number 3399, December 22, 1934, p. 963 ( doi: 10.1038 / 134963a0 ).

To work

• PME Drury: Vernon Harcourt and his inhaler . In: Proceedings of the History of Anesthesia Society . Volume 30, 2002, pp. 29-33 ( PDF ).
• M. Christine King: Chemestry's White Knight. Augustus Vernon Harcourt . In: New Scientist . June 28, 1979, pp. 1110-1111 ( online ).
• M. Christine King: The Chemist in Allegory: Augustus Vernon Harcourt and the White Knight . In Journal of Chemical Education . Volume 60, Number 3, 1983, pp. 177-180 ( doi: 10.1021 / ed060p177 ).
• M. Christine King: The course of chemical change: the life and times of Augustus G. Vernon Harcourt 1834-1919 . In: Ambix . Volume 31, Number 1, 1984 pp. 16-31 ( doi: 10.1179 / 000269884790224586 ).
• Keith J. Laidler: Chemical Kinetics and the Oxford College Laboratories . In: Archive for History of Exact Sciences . Volume 38, Number 3, 1988, SS 197-283 ( JSTOR 41133835 ).
• John AG Shorter: AG Vernon Harcourt: A founder of chemical kinetics and a friend of "Lewis Carroll" In Journal of Chemical Education . Volume 57, Number 6, 1980, pp. 411-416 ( doi: 10.1021 / ed057p411 ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry ( memento of August 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at Cracroft's Peerage. The Complete Guide to the British Peerage & Baronetage.
2. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Augustus George Vernon Harcourt at academictree.org, accessed on February 8, 2018.

Web links

• Entry to Harcourt; Augustus George Vernon (1834–1919) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
• Article ( Memento of March 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at the Ryde Social Heritage Group