William Odling

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William Odling (born September 5, 1829 in Southwark (now London), † February 17, 1921 in Oxford ) was an English chemist.

Live and act

William Odling became a lecturer in chemistry at St. Bartholomew Hospital Medical School in 1850 and a demonstrator at Guy's Hospital Medical School in London. In 1868 he succeeded Michael Faraday Fullerian as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution , where he held the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1868 and 1870 ( The chemical changes of carbon , burning and unburning ). From 1872 until his retirement in 1912 he was Waynflete Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of Worcester College at Oxford University .

Around 1855 he was a co-founder of the concept of valence and from 1855 expanded the type theory of Charles Frédéric Gerhardt and Auguste Laurent . With his division of the elements into 13 "natural groups" (1857) and his element tables (1857–65) he created the forerunners of the periodic table . The proposal to arrange chemical elements in groups coincided with that of John Alexander Reina Newlands in England in 1864 . Newland had started his experiments a little earlier, but Odling had the advantage of having attended the famous congress in Karlsruhe in 1860, which Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Iwanowitsch Mendeleev also attended, and heard from Stanislao Cannizzaro about his teaching and determination of atomic weights. While Newland was only able to classify 24 of the 60 elements known at the time in his system in 1864, only Odling was able to classify 57 elements. His announcement of the periodicity also came a little earlier to the London Chemical Society than Newlands of 1865 (although done in the same year and probably independently). Odling also became a leader in spreading the ideas of Cannizzaro and Avogadro in England. The elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight and he made predictions about missing elements. The periodicity he observed was 16.

Independently of August Kekulé , he proposed the tetravalence of carbon (Proc. Royal Institution 1855).

In 1859 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1875 an honorary doctorate from the University of Leiden . In 1848 he became a Fellow, in 1856 Honorary Secretary, 1869 Vice President and 1873 President of the Chemical Society of London , which he remained until 1875. He was censor from 1878 to 1880 and 1882 to 1891, vice president from 1878 to 1880 and 1888 to 1891, and president of the Institute of Chemistry from 1883 to 1888.

Works

  • Manual of Chemistry . (1861)
  • On the Proportional Numbers of the Elements , Quarterly Journal of Science, Volume 1, 1864, pp. 642-648
  • Course of Practical Chemistry . (2nd edition, 1865)
  • Animal Chemistry . (1866)
  • Chemical Changes of Carbon . (1868)
  • Outlines of Chemistry . (1870)
  • Chemistry . (1882)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Scerri, The periodic table, 2007, p. 82ff