George Beilby

Sir George Thomas Beilby (born November 17, 1850 in Edinburgh , † August 1, 1924 in Hampstead , London ) was a Scottish chemist.

Beilby was the son of a doctor and studied civil engineering at Edinburgh University. He then worked with William Young at the Oakbank Oil Company to develop a process to extract more oil and nitrogen in the form of ammonium sulfate from oil shale (patent 1882). This displaced the old distillation processes and made the oil shale industry more competitive with petroleum.

In 1891 he found an improved method to produce sodium and potassium cyanide, which were needed for gold and silver mining. Ammonia gas was passed through a melt of a mixture of charcoal and carbonates of the alkali metals at a temperature of 850 degrees Celsius. The first factory was built in Leith (Scotland) in 1891 . Beilby became director of Cassel Cyanide and later the Castner-Kellner Company in Runcorn , for which he built their factory in Wallsend .

The process for obtaining sodium cyanide is sometimes also called the Hamilton Castner or the Castner-Kellner process , but these names are ambiguous. Castner apparently found the Beilby method independently in 1894 (it was first implemented industrially in Frankfurt am Main in 1899).

In 1906 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1899 he was president of the Society of Chemical Industry and in 1905 of the chemistry section of the British Association. From 1909 to 1912 he was President of the Institute of Chemistry and from 1916 to 1918 of the Institute of Metals. In 1912 he became a member of the Royal Navy's Royal Fuel and Machinery Commission and, during World War I, a member of the Admiralty Board of Inventions and Research. In 1916 he was ennobled.

The Beilby Medal in Chemical Engineering has been awarded by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Society of Chemical Industry since 1930.

Fonts

The Aggregation and Flow of Solids, 1921

Web links

Wikisource: George Beilby - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

↑ after Holleman, Wiberg, Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry, De Gruyter, 102nd edition 2007, p. 912
↑ Comyns, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Named Processes in Chemical Technology, CRC Press, 4th edition 2014. There under the processes named after Castner.

personal data
SURNAME	Beilby, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Beilby, George Thomas (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Scottish chemist
DATE OF BIRTH	November 17, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH	Edinburgh
DATE OF DEATH	August 1, 1924
Place of death	Hampstead , London

[1] ter Holleman, Wiberg, Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry, De Gruyter, 102nd edition 2007, p. 912

[2] Comyns, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Named Processes in Chemical Technology, CRC Press, 4th edition 2014. There under the processes named after Castner.