James Young (chemist)
James Young (born July 13, 1811 Drygate, Glasgow , † May 13, 1883 in Kelly near Greenock on Wemyss Bay ) was a Scottish chemist and entrepreneur in the petrochemical industry ( lamp oils, lubricating oils and paraffin from coal and oil shale ).
Life
Young was the son of a carpenter and received his education in the evening school of Anderson College (now University of Strathclyde ) in Glasgow (from 1830). There he befriended David Livingstone . At Anderson College he was a student of Thomas Graham and went with him as his assistant to University College London . In 1839 he was employed in the chemical works of James Muspratt in St Helens (Merseyside) and in 1843 in the chemical manufacturer Charles Tennant in Manchester .
He became known and wealthy as an industrialist in the petrochemical industry and is considered a pioneer of the shale oil industry in Scotland. He first worked in petrochemicals in 1847 when he distilled lamp oil and lube oil from an oil well in the Riddings coal mine near Alfreton in Derbyshire . This enabled him to go into business for himself with his friend and assistant Edward Meldrum. The oil well dried up soon and he experimented with the extraction of oil from bituminous coal and the like, whereby he gained paraffin by slow distillation. In 1850 he applied for a patent ( English Patent 13292 ) and in 1851 he opened a plant in Bathgate with Edward William Binney as a partner . It was the first real petrochemical factory in the world. In 1852 he also received a US patent on paraffin oil distillation from coal and in the same year he moved from Manchester to Scotland. In 1865 he bought out his partners and built a second larger factory in Addiewell, near West Calder, in Scotland . In 1866 he retired from active business life and devoted himself to scientific interests, travel and sailing, in 1870 he withdrew completely from business life and moved to his country estate in Kelly. He was buried in nearby Inverkip . Young's Paraffin Light and Mineral Oil Company sold paraffin oil for lamps worldwide and earned in licenses. Young himself was nicknamed Paraffin Young.
In 1845 he advocated the treatment of seed potatoes with dilute sulfuric acid against late blight . His earliest work included a proposal to extract sodium stannate from pewter stone, and in 1872 he proposed to the Royal Navy that lime milk prevent rusting of ship hulls after discovering that the bilge water was acidic. In 1880 he undertook experiments with the physicist and inventor George Forbes (1849-1936), who was a professor at Anderson College, to determine the speed of light in an improved Fizeau experiment .
He collected old books on alchemy and chemistry and assembled a famous library that went to Anderson College (now the Andersonian Library of the University of Strathclyde ). John Ferguson prepared a catalog of the collection of alchemical literature and published it as Bibliotheca Chemica (a standard work on the literature of alchemy). Ferguson also collected alchemical books, but his collection should not be confused with Young's (it is at the University of Glasgow).
In 1861 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1873 the Royal Society . From 1868 to 1877 he was President of Anderson College. In 1879 he received an honorary doctorate (LLD) from St. Andrews. From 1879 to 1881 he was Vice President of the Chemical Society.
He was married and had three sons and four daughters.
literature
- Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 463
Web links
(Philip Joseph Hartog in Dictionary of National Biography )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Young, James |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish chemist and entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 13, 1811 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Glasgow |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 13, 1883 |
| Place of death | Kelly at Greenock on Wemyss Bay |