Thomas Henry (pharmacist)

Thomas Henry (born October 26, 1734 in Wrexham , † June 18, 1816 in Manchester ) was an English pharmacist and chemist . In addition to his medical work, he improved, among other things, the production method of a laxative, produced soda water and dealt with chlorine bleach in the textile industry. Henry is the father of William Henry , who formulated Henry's Law on the solubility of gases in liquids.

Thomas Henry

Life

Thomas Henry came to his youngest son William, according to a "respectable family" who for generations in the County Antrim ( Northern Ireland was located). His father moved to Wales , married a pastor's daughter and ran a boarding school for girls in Wrexham, later in Manchester. Thomas Henry first attended grammar school (Latin school) in Wrexham. Since his parents could not afford an expensive education in Oxford , Henry went to a pharmacist in Wrexham to apprenticeship and discovered his interest in chemistry. He then became an assistant to Mr. Malbon, Oxford's main apothecary . Here he came into contact with other scholars and attended, among other things, anatomy lectures by John Hunter . In 1759 he moved to Knutsford for five years and married his wife Mary Kinsey there in 1760.

In 1764 Henry finally became a pharmacist in Manchester , where he would henceforth practice for almost five decades. In contemporary address directories he is listed as an apothecary and surgeon apothecary . Surgeons were simple doctors who, like the apothecaries (outdated for pharmacists, druggists) only qualified through an apprenticeship and at that time formed the backbone of medical care in England. There were few trained physicians who could call themselves physicians outside of London.

In 1775, Benjamin Franklin , John Pringle and Joseph Priestley applied to Henry for membership in the Royal Society (Royal Society, the British equivalent of an Academy of Sciences), so that from then on he was allowed to use the suffix FRS ( Fellow of the Royal Society ). The opportunity for scientific exchange with the most renowned natural scientists of his time opened up. In Manchester in 1779 Henry became one of the visiting apothecaries of the local hospital ( Manchester infirmary ), with whom he remained closely associated until his death. In 1781 Henry and other pharmacists, doctors and surgeons founded the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society , one of the oldest scientific scholars' associations in Great Britain alongside the Royal Society , and became one of its secretaries. In 1807 he became its president, an office which he held until his death in 1816. His successor was the famous naturalist John Dalton .

Thomas Henry had a daughter (whose baptism is recorded in the Anglican church book of Knutsford in 1763) and three sons: his eldest son Thomas was trained both in the cotton industry and by a doctor, and emigrated in 1794 with the later US politician Thomas Cooper and Joseph Priestley to the United States , but returned in 1836 and died a little later. The second son, Peter, was also interested in the industrial application of chemical knowledge, but apparently left Manchester as early as 1792. The youngest son was the future doctor and chemist William Henry (1774–1836), after whom Henry's law and Henry's constant are named. His son and Thomas Henry's grandson William Henry (1804-1892) also became a chemist and was one of John Dalton's friends.

Although his daughter was still baptized in an Anglican Church, Thomas Henry later appeared to be a Nonconformist and was one of the trustees (curators) of the Unitarian Cross Street Congregation, whose members then played an important role in the economic, political and social life of Manchester.

research

Classification and meaning

During Thomas Henry's lifetime, important upheavals took place in the field of natural sciences, such as the final refutation of the phlogiston theory by Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier in 1785. At the same time, chemical processes became increasingly important for the textile industry emerging in the course of the industrial revolution . As a Fellow of the Royal Society , Henry was in close contact with scientists and inventors of his time, including James Watt , with whom he had a long correspondence, and Lavoisier, whose essays he translated into English in 1775. Henry, who was self-taught and allegedly never had a large laboratory, was primarily concerned with applied chemistry. He developed new or improved manufacturing processes for various fabrics and ensured the dissemination and application of new scientific knowledge, for example in the textile industry. At the same time he laid the foundations for later research, such as the work of his youngest son William on the absorption of gases in water.

Henry's Calcined Magnesia

In Manchester, Thomas Henry began to conduct chemical experiments and in 1771 was able to present an improved method for the production of magnesia alba ( magnesium oxide ) and magnesium carbonate, including their medicinal uses, to the Royal College of Physicians in London . The substances had been described and researched by Joseph Black , but had only been of poor quality until then and were therefore of limited medical use. The Royal College published Henry's findings in their Medical Transactions the following year . In 1773 his article appeared again, together with other articles, in the volume Experiments and Observations and was controversially discussed in a scholars' dispute. In the end, it prevailed, and Henry's method found its way into numerous standard chemical works. Henry's calcined magnesia (Henry calcined magnesia) was used as antacid and laxative also commercially successful. In 1804 at the latest, the preparation was exported to the United States ; a production in Manchester is documented until at least the 1880s. The preparation is mentioned in numerous pharmaceutical publications, e.g. B. 1901 in Dental Medicine . The extraordinary quality of Henry's calcined magnesia due to the special manufacturing process was even determined by a court: In 1886, long after the death of the company founder and his son William, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Henry's calcined magnesia , unlike ordinary, was customary loosely supplied calcined magnesium is to be classified as a drug and is therefore subject to an import duty of 50%. The judgment was of course not in the interests of the importer J. & S. Ferguson, who had argued that the preparation only had to be declared at the much lower tariff for the chemical raw material (12 cents per pound). The judgment also mentions the then wholesale prices for a dozen 1- ounce bottles of Henry's calcined magnesia : 27 shillings in England and $ 8.50 in the US , more than twice as much as the best locally made competing product.

Mineral and soda water

Henry also worked on preserving food and especially drinking water, a problem of great importance at the time. He experimented with calcined magnesium, lime and so-called still air ("still air") or fixed air , ie the carbon dioxide produced from the reaction of these substances with acid . In the 1760s, other scientists, including William Brownrigg, Henry Cavendish , Joseph Priestley and the Swede Tobern Olof Bergmann , had already dealt with the components of mineral water , carbon dioxide and the production of artificial aerated waters . In 1772, a year before Henry, Priestley had described a method of aerating water artificially, for which he was later awarded the Copley Medal . Henry's biographer AE Musson, however, thinks it likely that Henry and Priestley came to similar conclusions simultaneously and independently of one another. However, Priestley's method was not yet widely applicable.

However, the preservation of drinking water was of great interest to the Kriegsmarine in particular , as it had to ensure that the sailors could be adequately supplied with fresh water even on long sea voyages. Attempts to preserve the water with lime and then to make this lime water edible again with magnesia proved to be impractical. In 1781, Henry proposed to the Lords Commissioners (of the Admiralty ) in his pamphlet Account of a Method of Preserving Water, at Sea, from Putrefaction by means of quicklime, a new method of "protecting water from rotting at sea". It should fixed air ( carbon dioxide obtained from the reaction of sulfuric acid with limestone or chalk, ie calcium carbonate ), the lime is passed through the lime water as carbonate precipitated so that the original taste of the water and be recovered. At the same time he recommended the production of artificial mineral water on a large scale "for the use of the sick, on board ships, and in hospitals" (for use by the sick, on board ships and in hospitals). The previously known devices by John Merwyn Nooth (1775), Parker (described by Priestley, 1777) and Magellan (1777) were only suitable for normal household quantities, which Henry tried to improve with a new device. Initially a pig's bladder was used to induce carbonation, and a little later - at the suggestion of Dr. Following Haygarth from Chester - a bellows used. Henry also published recipes for Pyrmont and Seltzer waters , imitations of natural healing waters, as well as for Mr Bewley's mephitic julep , which should help against stomach ailments. William Bewley, a pharmacist from Great Massingham, Norfolk and a friend of John Priestley, had experimented with magnesia, lime and mephitic air (carbon dioxide). He was one of the first to add small amounts of sodium carbonate to the water and use it to create soda water ("mephitic julep").

Henry now began the commercial production of mineral and soda water - when exactly is not documented, but probably as early as the 1770s. Several advertisements have come down to us from the 1780s, but mostly for medical purposes. This makes Henry one of the first manufacturers of mineral and soda water - alongside the German Jacob Schweppe , who patented his process in 1783 and marketed his soda water in London since 1792. Henry's youngest son, William, joined the business in 1797 . A commemorative plaque for William Henry in St. Anne's Square in Manchester mentions the first production of mineral water in "Cupid's Alley (Atkinson Street)" in 1802, another factory was added later in Birmingham and further expansion was planned. Ultimately, however, William Henry left the mineral water business to his partner Samuel Thompstone and focused again on the manufacture and sale of magnesia.

Brewing and food technology

Henry also laid some foundations for industrial production in the field of food technology. So he found out that the original wort (English word ) can be fermented in beer brewing without the addition of yeast, if it is carbonated. This allowed the fermentation process to be accelerated and the beer became tastier. Further experiments with vinegar and acetic acid led to the production of flavored, fragrant vinegar essences, which Henry even sold in London through Bayley's perfumery.

Textile industry

Finally, Thomas Henry dealt in detail with possible uses of chemistry in cotton processing in the textile industry, for example in bleaching , dyeing and calico printing . In this way he succeeded in improving Berthollet's method of bleaching chlorine , and he encouraged the application of the new knowledge in the factories of the County of Lancashire . The attempt to gain a foothold in the industry at the end of the 1780s, however, failed - apparently not least because of the duplicity of his business partner John Wilson. After a long and serious illness, Henry, who in the meantime (1789) had been appointed visiting apothecary at Manchester Hospital, devoted himself again to his medical work.

Soft drink brand

At the end of 2010 , the Berlin company Thomas Henry GmbH & Co. KG launched a soft drink brand named after Thomas Henry. The company sells soda water , tonic water , bitter lemon , ginger ale and ginger beer (Spicy Ginger) , among others . The representation on the company website, according to which Thomas Henry was the inventor of soda water in 1773, is incorrect (see above). The brand logo is a stylized portrait and is reminiscent of a painting on which, however, not Thomas Henry, but his son William can be seen.

Publications

• An Account of the Medicinal Virtues of Magnesia Alba, More Particularly of Calcined Magnesia. Printed for J. Johnson, London 1775 ( digitized ). Reprint with errata and advertising sheet: Gale Ecco, Print Editions, 2010, ISBN 978-1-170-68371-2 .
• An account of a method of preserving water, at sea, from putrefaction, and of restoring to the water its original pleasantness and purity, by a cheap and easy process. W. Eyres for J. Johnson, London, 1781 ( archive.org ). Reprinted by Gale Ecco, 2010, ISBN 978-1-170-54128-9 .
• On the preservation of sea water from putrefaction by means of quicklime by Thomas Henry FRS , Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Soc. of Manchester, Vol. 1, Manchester 1885, pp. 41ff.
• Experiments and Observations on Ferments and Fermentation, Addressed to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. W. Eyres, Warrington, 1785 ( limited preview in Google Book search). Reprint: Gale Ecco, Print Editions, 2010, ISBN 1-170-09087-7 .

Literature on Thomas Henry

• William Henry: A tribute to the Memory of the late President Thomas Henry of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester . Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Memoirs, 2nd ser., Vol. 3, Manchester 1819 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• AE Musson: Early Industrial Chemists Thomas Henry (1734-1816) and His Sons . In: AE Musson, Eric Robinson: Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1969, ISBN 978-0-7190-0370-7 , pp. 231-249.

Web links

• Craig Thornber: Thomas Henry, FRS and his son, William Henry, MD, FRS, GS , accessed March 4, 2011.

Individual evidence

1. ^ After the death of his father, William Henry published A tribute to the Memory of the late President Thomas Henry of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester . Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Memoirs, 2nd ser., Vol. 3, Manchester 1819 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
2. ^ Henry, Thomas (1734–1816) Entry Thomas Henry (English) in the Welsh Biography, Author: Emeritus Professor Robert Thomas Jenkins, CBE, D.Litt., Ll.D., FSA, (1881–1969), Bangor, Retrieved August 28, 2012.
3. ^ Geoffrey Head: A brief history of Cross Street Chapel. In: cross-street-chapel.org.uk. Retrieved March 4, 2011 . 
4. ↑ Essays Physical and Chemical; By M. Lavoisier, Translated from the French, with Notes, and an Appendix, by Thomas Henry . Printed for Joseph Johnson in 1776 ( archive.org ). Reprint: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2009, ISBN 978-0-217-20988-5 .
5. ↑ Thomas Henry, FRS and his son, William Henry, MD, FRS, GS by Craig Thornber, accessed March 4, 2011.
6. ^ Ferdinand James Samuel Gorgas: Dental Medicine. A Manual Of Dental Materia Medica And Therapeutics. P. Blakiston's Son & Co., 7th edition 1901 ( archive.org ).
7. ↑ Ferguson v. Arthur, late collector. United States Supreme Court, File No. 6 S.Ct. 861, 117 US 482 , 29 L.Ed. 979, filed April 5, 1886; and Ferguson v. Arthur, Opinion of the Court , further reference at Wikisource . Both accessed online March 4, 2011.
8. ↑ For his publication Experimental inquiry concerning the nature of the mineral elastic spirit or air contained in the Pouhon water, and other acidulae , Brownrigg was awarded the Copley Medal in 1766 .
9. ↑ Joseph Priestley: Directions for impregnating water with fixed air; in order to communicate to it the peculiar spirit and virtues of Pyrmont water, and other mineral waters of a similar nature . Printed for J. Johnson, London 1772 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
10. ^ AE Musson: Early Industrial Chemists Thomas Henry (1734-1816) and His Sons . In: AE Musson, Eric Robinson: Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1969, ISBN 978-0-7190-0370-7 , p. 235.
11. ↑ On the preservation of sea water from putrefaction by means of quicklime by Thomas Henry FRS . In: Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Soc. of Manchester, Vol. 1, Manchester 1785, pp. 41ff. Translated, the title means: Report on a method of using calcium oxide to keep water at sea from rotting.
12. ↑ Colin Emins: Soft Drinks (Shire Album 269) (PDF; 5 MB) . Shire Publications, Princes Risborough (Buckinghamshire, UK) 1991, ISBN 0-7478-0125-8 , pp. 9f.
13. ^ AE Musson: Early Industrial Chemists Thomas Henry (1734-1816) and His Sons . In: AE Musson, Eric Robinson: Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1969, ISBN 978-0-7190-0370-7 , p. 238.
14. ↑ Thomas Henry starts attacking Schweppes with the mixer series ( memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ). In: Mixology magazine. No. 5, October 2010, p. 114.
15. ^ Website of the company "Thomas Henry", accessed on March 4, 2016.
16. ↑ See Portrait of William Henry , National Portrait Gallery, London, accessed August 28, 2012.