John Campbell Earl

John Campbell Earl (born May 18, 1890 in Adelaide , † December 25, 1978 in Adelaide) was an Australian chemist .

Life

John Campbell Earl attended Adelaide Elementary School. When his parents died, he was taken to England to attend Great Yarmouth Grammar School. After studying chemistry at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury (London), he worked from 1911 at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington . In 1913 he returned to Australia where he worked as an assistant director in analytical chemistry at the University of Adelaide . In 1917 he received a call to work as a qualified chemist in potentially explosive companies in Britain. He was thus stationed in Gretna (Scotland) . In 1920 Earl moved to the University of St Andrews to join a research unit. This was followed in 1922 by a teaching position at the University of Sydney . In 1938, Earl Winifred married Kate Vincent Jones. In the same year he became President of the Royal Society of New South Wales . Earl was a very good and valued leader of many students. He taught skills such as clear thinking, hard work and perseverance. Even if he was considered to be particularly considerate and helpful towards his employees, he represented unusual ideas and views on running a university. Due to recurring differences of opinion with the rector of the university and many other colleagues, he retired in 1947. He moved to Norfolk , England with his wife and continued his interest in science at City College (Norwich) , where he worked as a consultant in a malt house and as a writer for the British Chemical Abstract . When his wife died in 1967, he returned to Adelaide. There he spent most of his time at university, was an acting master (1969–1970) at Kathleen Lumley College, attended symposia and occasionally published articles.

research

During the 1930s, Earl was researching nitroso compounds and discovered a new class of cyclic compounds - the sydnones. In 1935 he published his discovery in the Journal of the Chemical Society and received the HG Smith Medal from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. From 1939 he focused his research on projects that served defense. He thus assisted the government and developed preparations such as antiseptics and proflavines , preparations for war wounds, a large number of preparations of the British anti- Lewisite , the composition of colored smoke for effective signal communication under jungle conditions, the industrial production of dimethylaniline for conversion into explosives , Tetryl and the development of a practical process for the rapid reproduction of maps and machine drawings. In memory of his work, he became a member of the Society of Chemical Industry in London.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} D. J. Brown: Earl, John Campbell (1890-1988) . In: Australian Dictionary of Biography . National Center of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra ( edu.au [accessed June 1, 2019]).