William Hyde Wollaston

William Hyde Wollaston was a British physicist and chemist (East Dereham, August 6, 1776 – London, December 22, 1828). He perfected the battery invented by the Italian Alessandro Volta, and discovered the metals rhodium and palladium.

Biography

Wollaston was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, and in 1793 obtained his medical doctorate from Cambridge University. During his studies there, he became interested in chemistry, crystallography, metallurgy, and physics. In 1800 he gave up medicine and concentrated on these interests instead of practicing his own profession.

He became wealthy developing a physicochemical method for processing platinum, and during testing of the device discovered palladium in 1803 and rhodium in 1804.

Throughout the last years of his life he carried out electrical experiments that would pave the way for the design of the electric motor. However, controversy arose when Michael Faraday, who was undoubtedly the first to build an electric motor, refused to credit Wollaston for his earlier work.

Wollaston is also noted for his observations of dark lines in the solar spectrum, which eventually led to the discovery of elements in the Sun (see: History of spectroscopy), and for his work on the hypsometer and various optical devices.

In 1793 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and served as Secretary of the Society from 1804 to 1816.

Published Writings

• On the force of percussion [On the force of percussion], 1805
• Wollaston, William Hyde (1808). «On Super-Acid and Sub-Acid Salts». Phil. Trans. 98: 96-102. doi:10.1098/rstl.1808,0006. [On superacid and subacid salts]

Honors and Awards

• 1793: a member of the Royal Society, his secretary (1804-1816), president (1820, briefly) and vice president (1820-1828).
• 1802: Copley Medal
• 1802, 1805, 1812, 1828: Bakerian Conference.
• 1809: Croatian Conference
• 1813: member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden.
• 1828: Royal Medal

Acknowledgments

The following have been named in his honor:

• Wollaston Prisma.
• Wollastonite, a chain silicate mineral.
• The lunar crater Wollaston carries this name in his memory.
• Medalla Wollaston, granted by the Geological Society of London since 1831
  • Laureates with the Wollaston medal
• Lake Wollaston, Saskatchewan province, Canada, a freshwater lake 2681 km2.
• Wollaston Islands, Chile.
• Wollaston Foreland, NE Greenland.
• Wollaston Peninsula, at the south-west end of Victoria Island, Canada.
• Wollaston wire, extremely thin platinum wire.

It has been mentioned that Wollaston has not received the renown that it should for his historical position in the world of science: his contemporaries Thomas Young, Humphry Davy and John Dalton have become much better known. Different reasons have been suggested for this, including that Wollaston himself was neither systematic nor conventional in presenting his discoveries, even publishing anonymously (initially) on the palladium case. In addition, and perhaps most important to his modern legacy, his private documents were inaccessible and his notebooks disappeared shortly after his death and remained so for more than a century; they were finally collected in the late 1960s at Cambridge University with the first full biography completed by Melvyn Usselman in 2015, after more than 30 years of research.