Edward Turner (chemist)

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Bust of Edward Turner

Edward Turner (born June 24, 1798 in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica , † February 12, 1837 in Hampstead ( London )) was an English chemist .

Life

Turner grew up partly in Bath and studied medicine there with his brother in Edinburgh with a doctorate in 1819 (MD). His brother went back to Jamaica as a doctor, Edward Turner himself practiced in Bath and after a visit to Paris decided to devote himself to chemistry and studied chemistry and mineralogy in Göttingen with Friedrich Stromeyer . After returning in 1823 he was a lecturer in Edinburgh and in 1828 first professor of chemistry at the newly founded University College of the University of London . There he also taught geology.

Turner became known for his fight against the assumption, advocated by William Prout , that all atomic masses must be integral multiples of the atomic mass of hydrogen . Thomas Thomson tried to support Prout's thesis experimentally, but it had already been refuted by Humphry Davy's tables of atomic weights and finally by the tables of Jöns Jacob Berzelius (the reason, as it turned out much later, was the existence of isotopes). Turner also attacked Thomson's investigations and Prout's thesis (publications in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1829 and 1833) and confirmed Berzelius.

He studied the composition of ores, minerals and mineral waters, especially manganese ores, and investigated the effects of toxic gases on plants. His chemistry textbook had eight editions.

In 1826 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1831 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1830). In 1835 he was Vice President of the Geological Society of London .

Works

  • Introduction to the Study of the Laws of Chemical Combination and the Atomic Theory , 1825
  • Elements of chemistry , 1827. (8 editions, German by Hartmann Leipzig 1829, later published in a higher edition by Liebig )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 243.