Background
Edward Frankland was born on January 18, 1825, in Catterall, Lancashire, United Kingdom. He was the illegitimate son of Peggy Frankland, the daughter of a calico printer.
United Kingdom
Edward Frankland
United Kingdom
Edward Frankland
United Kingdom
Edward Frankland
United Kingdom
Edward Frankland
Lancaster Royal Grammar School, East Rd, Lancaster LA1 3EF, United Kingdom
Edward was educated at Lancaster Grammar School.
The Storey, Meeting House Ln Lancaster LA1 1TH, United Kingdom
Edward attended the Lancaster Mechanics' Institute.
Biegenstraße 10, 35037 Marburg, Germany
Edward took his Ph.D. from the University of Marburg in 1849.
Edward Frankland was born on January 18, 1825, in Catterall, Lancashire, United Kingdom. He was the illegitimate son of Peggy Frankland, the daughter of a calico printer.
After education in seven schools, including Lancaster Grammar School, Edward was apprenticed by his stepfather, William Helm, to a Lancaster druggist, Stephen Ross. He then attended the Lancaster Mechanics' Institute. Subsequent studies took him to laboratories at the University of Marburg, where he took his Ph.D. in 1849.
In 1846 Frankland became Playfair’s assistant at the Civil Engineering College at Putney, London. From 1847 to 1848 he taught science with John Tyndall at the progressive Quaker school run by George Edmondson at Queenwood, Hampshire. He then returning to London to take Playfair’s chair of chemistry at Putney from 1850 to 1851. He became a professor of chemistry at Owens College, Manchester, in 1851, but this position proved unsatisfactory. In 1857 he returned to London, where, until 1864, he was a lecturer in chemistry at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Frankland also indulged in the pluralism of a lectureship in science at Addiscombe Military College from 1859 to 1863, and from 1863 to 1869 he was a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution. Finally, in 1865, he succeeded A. W. Hofmann as a professor of chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry, a position he retained through the college’s many transformations until his retirement in 1885. From 1865, Frankland made official monthly analyses of the water supplies of London, and from 1868 to 1874 he served on the important Royal Commission on Rivers Pollution.
At the age of eighteen Frankland underwent an extreme form of evangelical conversion, but after 1848 he lapsed into skepticism. Together with Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, J. D. Hooker, and others, he was an active member of an informal scientific pressure group which called itself the X Club. Yet the club was unable to gain for Frankland the presidency of the Royal Society or of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, owing to his modesty and poor ability in public debate.
Frankland’s extraordinary practical and manipulative ability, as well as his power, like Bunsen’s, to combine physics with chemistry, was exemplified in all three of the broad categories of his research: organic, physical, and applied chemistry. In 1844 H. Fehling had obtained a new compound, benzonitrile, by the dry distillation of ammonium benzoate. Following Schlieper’s preparation of valeronitrile, in 1846, Kolbe and Frankland noted that both nitriles were easily hydrolyzed to their corresponding acids. In their joint work of 1847, they pointed out that if these so-called nitriles were really cyanides, then their hydrolysis would agree with Berzelius’ iconoclastic suggestion that acetic acid was a methyl radical conjugated with oxalic acid. If both these assumptions were made, it followed that the homologs of acetic acid arose from the conjugation of oxalic acid with ethyl radicals. Their production of propionic acid from ethyl cyanide in 18471 led Frankland and Kolbe to attempt separately the isolation of alkyl radicals from acids: Kolbe by the electrolysis of acids and Frankland by using a reaction between alkyl iodides and zinc-based on analogy with Bunsen’s celebrated isolation of cacodyl in 1837. But after much controversy and the reform of atomic weights, Frankland was forced to admit that the formulas of the radicals he prepared between 1848 and 1851 had to be doubled and that the radicals were, in fact, inert hydrocarbons of the paraffin series.
The work on radicals also led Frankland in 1849 to the isolation of a new reactive organometallic compound, zinc methyl. This, together with the alkyl tin compounds which he prepared in 1850 by the action of sunlight on alkyl halides in the presence of tin, produced the following problem. If, as the conjugation theories of Berzelius and Liebig held, the different alkyl groups associated with oxalic acid had little or no influence on the combining properties of the acid, why did alkylconjugated metals have combining powers different from those of the metals alone? For example, in diethyl formed only one oxide, whereas tin itself formed at least two oxides. Zinc methyl, on the other hand, seemed to possess the same singular combining power as zinc. Here was the seed of the concept of the valance, which, with an international agreement on atomic weight values, was to unite the rival theoretical schools of chemistry during the 1860s into the common aim of structural chemistry.
Frankland was quick to see that the analytical techniques he had developed and the organometallic compounds he had prepared would be powerful aids to synthesis, by which he meant the chemist’s ability to build up compounds “stone by stone” with a view to understanding their atomic configurations. From 1863 to 1870 he and Baldwin Duppa exploited zinc ethyl and other organic reagents, including ethyl acetate, in the synthesis of ethers, dicarboxylic acids, unsaturated monocarboxylic acids, and hydroxy acids. This meticulous work revealed clearly the structure and relationship of these compounds, and of course, its methodology had great bearing on the growth of the chemical industry.
Intermittent work on combustion during the 1860s was initiated by a memorable ascent of, and nighton, Mont Blanc with Tyndall in 1859. Frankland found that Humphry Davy’s views on the nature of flame were unsound and that pressure variations produced striking changes in the illuminating power of flames. He showed the relevance of this finding to the supply of domestic illuminating gas and, in 1868, to stellar spectroscopy. During the latter brief investigation in collaboration with the astronomer J. N. Lockyer, lines of helium were first observed in the sun, but Frankland did not agree with Lockyer’s interpretation that helium was a new element.
Frankland’s wide interests included biology. In 1865, together with Adolf Fick and Johannes Wislicenus, he designed an experiment to test Liebig’s theory that the source of muscular energy was the oxidation of nitrogenous muscular tissue. The two Germans performed this experiment by ascending Mt. Faulhorn in Switzerland while on a protein-free diet, then measuring the nitrogen output in their urine. That confirmed their suspicion that muscular energy comes principally from the oxidation of nonnitrogenous materials. It remained for Frankland to confirm in the laboratory that the oxidation of carbohydrates and fats produces sufficient energy to account for the mechanical work of an organism. His calorimetric experiments of 1866 on the energy values of common foodstuffs laid the foundation for quantitative dietetics.
In 1867, together with H. E. Armstrong, Frankland devised a method for analyzing water by combustion analysis of organic carbon and nitrogen in vacuo. A rival method developed by J. A. Wanklyn in the same year, which identified nitrogen content as ammonia, led to acrimonious disputes between the two men over the respective merits of their systems. Frankland’s method, although extremely accurate, proved too cumbersome and difficult for the unskilled, so Wanklyn’s simpler but less reliable technique was usually preferred by public analysts. Frankland’s humanitarian and scientific interest in water analysis was continued by his son Percy.
Frankland was a member of the Chemical Society and the Institute of Chemistry. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Frankland possessed a voracious appetite for travel, which he combined with mountaineering, yachting, and fishing. He was also a keen gardener, music lover, and amateur astronomer.
Edward Frankland married to Sophie Fick in 1851. After Sophie's death from tuberculosis in 1874, in 1875 Frankland married Ellen Frances Grenside. He had three sons and two daughters from his first wife and two daughters from the second wife.