Charles Bury (chemist)

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Charles Rugeley Bury (born July 29, 1890 in Henley-on-Thames , † December 30, 1968 in Chichester ) was a British chemist.

Life

Bury, the son of a lawyer, attended school in Malvern and studied at Oxford University (Trinity College), where he received a bachelor's degree with honors. After that he was a demonstrator in physical chemistry. At that time he was concerned with the conductivity of various salts and solutions. In 1912/13 he was with Walter Nernst at the University of Göttingen . He then became an Assistant Lecturer at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth . During the First World War he served as a soldier at the front.

plant

After Eric Scerri, Bury has the merit of being the first to establish the periodic table with Bohr's atomic theory and the electron configurations derived from it. Niels Bohr himself did this only very sketchily and often used chemical and spectroscopic information even when he pretended to argue from scratch. Bury's system was introduced in the book The electronic theory of valence by Nevil Vincent Sidgwick in 1927.

In his essay, Bury criticized an earlier attempt by Irving Langmuir , who in 1919 believed that outer shells could only be filled when all inner shells were full. Instead of cells like Langmuir, he also spoke of shells. According to Bury, the shells fit 2, 8, 18 or 32 electrons (depending on their surface area). According to Bury, groups of 8 or 18 electrons were stable, regardless of whether the shell was full with them or not (further shells could then be filled, even if the old shell was not yet full). At the transition from 8 to 18 or 18 to 32, according to Bury, series of transition metals appeared, whereby he wrongly assumed (like the American Saul Dushman in 1917) that several electron configurations were possible.

He also predicted the existence of hafnium with atomic number 72 and also predicted that it was not a rare earth, but was related to this and found in zircon ores. This prediction is usually attributed to Niels Bohr, who, however, as Scerri emphasized, recognized Bury's priority and argued not exclusively from atomic theory on the basis of electron configurations such as Bury. Bury's contribution was later forgotten (one of the discoverers of the hafnium, George de Hevesy , never quoted it).

Fonts

  • Langmuir's theory of the arrangement of electrons in atoms and molecules, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Volume 43, 1921, pp. 1602-1609

literature

  • Mansel Davies: Charles Rugeley Bury and his Contributions to Physical Chemistry, Archives for the History of the Exact Sciences, Volume 36, 1986, pp. 75-90
  • Eric Scerri : A Tale of Seven Scientists, and a New Philosophy of Science , Oxford University Press, New York, 2016, pp. 93-102
  • Mansel Davies: Bury, Charles Rugeley. In: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography ( online) .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Langmuir, The arrangement of electrons in atoms and molecules, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Volume 41, 1919, pp. 868-934
  2. ↑ Dushman, The structure of atoms, General Electric Review, Volume 20, 1917, pp. 186-196
  3. ↑ On hafnium and its discovery: Scerri, A tale of seven elements, Oxford UP, 2013, Chapter 4, and Scerri, Prediction of the Nature of Hafnium from Chemistry, Bohr's Theory and Quantum Theory, Annals of Science, Volume 51, 1994, Pp. 137-150
personal data
SURNAME Bury, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bury, Charles Rugeley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Henley-on-Thames
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1968
Place of death Chichester