Samuel Pickles

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Samuel Shrowder Pickles (born April 15, 1878 in Rochdale , † February 11, 1962 in Bradford-on-Avon ) was a British chemist.

Pickles was the son of an accountant (his mother's maiden name was Shrowder). He studied chemistry from 1900 at Owens College (later Victoria University Manchester) with a bachelor's degree in 1903, where he dealt with terpenes (synthesis of dipentenes) under William Henry Perkin junior . From 1903 to 1905 he was an assistant to Perkin and Harold Dixon and in 1906 he received his master’s degree. From 1905 he was with RW Dunstan at the Imperial Institute in London (South Kensington) and continued to work with terpenes and essential oils. In 1908 he received his doctorate in Manchester (D.Sc.).

He is known for the early proposal (long before Hermann Staudinger 1920) that rubber is composed of isoprene units in the form of long chains with a covalent bond between the units (i.e. in the form of polymers generally accepted today). He reported about this at the meeting in York of the British Association in 1906 (The present position of the chemistry of rubber) and published it in 1910. More precisely, he proposed (incorrectly) ring-shaped structures made up of at least 8 isoprene units, with chains of different lengths. The prevailing view at the time was that of Carl Harries (Kiel) that rubber consisted of a ring-like arrangement of isoprene dimers, these aggregates being held together by intermolecular forces. After moving to industry, he no longer dealt with the question of rubber structure. Pickles hadn't considered the question of stereochemistry. Staudinger was familiar with Pickles' work and cited them, for example, in 1917.

In 1912 he became chief chemist at the rubber company George Spencer, Moulton & Co., Ltd (now Avon Rubber PLC) in Bradford-upon-Avon. At Spencer, he led the introduction of neoprene and polysulfide rubber (Thiokol). In 1950 he retired there.

In 1939 he received the Colwyn Medal of the Institution of the Rubber Industry, for which he gave the sixth Foundation Lecture in Manchester in 1951.

literature

  • Dietrich Braun, Aubrey Jenkins: Samuel Pickle's formula of natural rubber, Chemistry in Our Time, Volume 50, December 2016, pp. 378–381

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SS Pickles, J. Chem. Soc., Volume 97, 1910, p. 1085. In Germany in 1910 it was reported in the Chemisches Zentralblatt and the Chemiker-Zeitung, but this received little attention.
  2. ↑ The isoprene component of rubber is discovered by Charles Hanson Greville Williams in 1860. Michael Faraday found the molecular formula in 1826 and William A. Tilden in 1882 the structural formula
  3. ↑ It has a cis structure, as Herman F. Mark and Kurt Heinrich Meyer found by X-ray structure analysis in 1928; Staudinger had previously assumed a trans structure.
  4. ↑ Pickles, The chemical constitution of the rubber molecule, Trans. Znst. Rubber Znd., Vol. 27, 1951, p. 148
personal data
SURNAME Pickles, Samuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pickles, Samuel Shrowder
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Rochdale
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1962
Place of death Bradford-on-Avon