This Month in Chemical History

Harold  Goldwhite

California State University,   Los Angeles

Among the sources I often consult for subjects for my columns is the book “Essays in Historical Chemistry” by Sir Edward Thorpe; my copy is dated 1911 and was published by Macmillan in London. As I was looking it over it occurred to me that I knew nothing about the author himself. A little research led me to the obituary notices of the Royal Society, and this sketch of Edward Thorpe’s distinguished career is drawn from information in the “Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased” of the Royal Society for 1925.

Thorpe was born in December 1845in a small town near Manchester, England where his father was a cotton merchant. He attended Hulme Grammar School and then Owens College, which developed into Manchester University. (Personal note: I was on the faculty of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology from 1958 to 1962, and we always referred to the central facility of the University, which was situated a couple of miles away, as “Owens”. At Owens Thorpe worked with the distinguished inorganic chemist Henry Roscoe on photochemistry and on the chemistry of vanadium. There followed the almost obligatory pilgrimage to Germany. At Heidelberg, under the tutelage of Bunsen, he worked on the remarkable liquid alloy of sodium and potassium, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. He lodged in the same building as Victor Meyer, who was also working with Bunsen, and they became close friends.

From Heidelberg he moved to Bonn to work with Kekule and they published in 1869 a paper on ethylbenzoic acid. Returning to Manchester he continued to collaborate with Roscoe and they jointly published two papers on photochemistry in 1870. As an up-and-coming young chemist it was not surprising that Thorpe was chosen for the Professorship in Chemistry at the Andersonian College of Glasgow, Scotland in 1870 and in that same eventful year he married Caroline Emma Watts. At Glasgow Thorpe published several papers: on a new oxychloride of chromium; on phosphorus chlorides; on the constitution of paraffin; and on the interaction between carbon tetrachloride and phosphorus pentasulfide. His work on chemical effects of light led to his going on an expedition to observe a total eclipse of the sun in Sicily to be observed on December 22, 1870. Sadly the ship was wrecked on the voyage from Naples to Sicily on December 15, but without loss of life.

Thorpe was “called” to the Professorship of Chemistry at the Yorkshire College of Science in Leeds (later Leeds University) in 1874 and worked there for 11 years. He turned to physico-chemical research on specific volumes of related liquid compounds and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876.  He made a successful trip to Colorado in July 1878 to observe the solar eclipse, and then began a series of magnetic observations, in collaboration with a physics colleague at Leeds, Professor Arthur Rucker. These included measurements along the 40th. parallel of the U.S. from the East Coast to the Great Salt Lake; in the Azores; and then a complete survey of terrestrial magnetism in the British Isles which was eventually published as a complete volume of Philosophical Transactions in 1896.

Thorpe was picked to succeed Sir Edward Frankland in 1885 as Professor of Chemistry at what was then the Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines in South Kensington, London – later known as Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London. In the next column I will complete my discussion of the career of this distinguished chemist.