William Hodson Brock

William Hodson Brock (* 1936 in Brighton ) is a British chemist and historian of science (especially chemical historian).

Brock studied chemistry from 1956 on a scholarship from University College London with a bachelor's degree in 1959. Even then, he turned to the history of chemistry and took courses in the history of science at the University of Leicester , where he was lecturer and later professor of history of science in 1959 . In 1966 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on William Prout . From 1966 to 1990 he directed the Victorian Studies Center at the University of Leicester, an interdisciplinary study center during the Victorian period. In 1998 he retired. He lives in Seaford, East Sussex .

He was visiting scholar in Toronto (1977), Melbourne (1985, 1989) and Philadelphia (1990 to 1991). After retiring, he was also an honorary visiting professor at the Center for the History and Cultural Studies of Science at the University of Kent .

In addition to the history of chemistry, on which he wrote an English-language standard work that has also been translated into German, Spanish, Polish and Japanese, Brock deals with the social history of natural sciences and mathematics of the Victorian era, the history of teaching in natural sciences and the development of science journals. He dealt with Justus von Liebig and his pupil August Wilhelm Hofmann (and edited their correspondence) and with the debate about the existence of the atom in the 19th century.

In 1995 he received the Dexter Award and he received the Liebig-Wöhler Friendship Prize of the Göttingen Chemical Society. In 1997 he received the Justus von Liebig Medal of the Medical Sciences History Society and in 2000 the Prize of the Justus Liebig University of Giessen. In 2009 he received the Roy G. Neville Prize for Biography or Bibliography from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (for his book on William Crookes ).

From 1993 to 2006 he was chairman of the Society for the History of Chemistry and Alchemy and edited its journal Ambix from 1968 to 1983 .

Fonts

• Viewegs Geschichte der Chemie (originally published in London in 1992 as The Fontana History of Chemistry and in the USA in 1993 as Norton History of Chemistry ). Vieweg, Wiesbaden 1997, ISBN 3-540-67033-5 .
• From Protyle to Proton: William Prout and the Nature of Matter, 1785-1985. CRC Press 1985.
• Science for All: Studies in the History of Victorian Science and Education. Aldershot 1996
• HE Armstrong and the Teaching of Science 1880-1930. 1973
• with Jack Meadows: The Lamp of Learning: Taylor & Francis and the development of science publishing. Taylor & Francis 1984, 2nd edition 1998
• with DM Knight, D. Dallas: The Atomic Debates. Leicester University Press 1967 and New York: Humanities Press (Brock: The Atomic Debates: Brodie and the rejection of atomic theory)
• Editor: Liebig and Hofmann in their letters (1841–1873). Weinheim: Verlag Chemie 1984
• Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper. Cambridge University Press 1998
  • German edition: Justus von Liebig. A biography of the great natural scientist and European. Springer 1999
• William Crookes (1832-1919) and the Commercialization of Science. Ashgate 2008

Web links

• Biography at the ACS, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ^ Neville Prize