Background
Thomas Anderson was born on July 2, 1819, in Leith, Scotland, and was the eldest of nine children of Charles Anderson (1772–1855), a surgeon, and his wife, Mary, daughter of John Rhind, manager of an Edinburgh insurance office.
First Anderson was educated at the high school there and at Edinburgh Academy.
The University of Edinburgh where Anderson studied medicine, graduating in 1841.
Anderson was awarded a Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1872 for his investigations on the organic bases of Dippells animal oil, on codeine, and on the crystallized constituents of opium, as well as for his researches in physiological and animal chemistry.
Anderson was also awarded the Keith Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1853.
Thomas Anderson was born on July 2, 1819, in Leith, Scotland, and was the eldest of nine children of Charles Anderson (1772–1855), a surgeon, and his wife, Mary, daughter of John Rhind, manager of an Edinburgh insurance office.
First Anderson was educated at the high school there and at Edinburgh Academy. He then studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1841. The subject of his doctoral thesis, the chemical changes accompanying nutrition and other physiological processes, shows the direction his interests were to take.
After studying under Berzelius in Stockholm in 1842, the following year Thomas Anderson worked in Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen; after visiting other European centers of chemical and medical research, he returned to Edinburgh. In 1845 he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in the following year he began lecturing in the extramural medical school in Edinburgh. When Thomas Thomson died in 1852, Anderson succeeded him as professor of chemistry at Glasgow.
All Anderson’s important work was done in the field of organic chemistry, but in addition to his pure research, he carried out numerous analyses of soils, manures, and cattle foods. As chemist to the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, he examined the composition of wheat, beans, and turnips at various stages of growth, and the results were published in the Society’s Journal over a period of twenty-five years. He also published a treatise on agricultural chemistry in 1860. His work was virtually brought to an end in 1869 by serious illness.
In Anderson’s first important paper, read in 1846, he described how, on examining a mixture of bases derived from coal tar, he had found a minute quantity of pyrrole (discovered twelve years before by Runge) and, in attempting to separate it, had been led to the discovery of a new base, which he called picoline and found to be an isomer of aniline.
This was the first discovered member of the pyridine series of bases, and in a group of researches on the products of the distillation of bone oil (1848-1868) Anderson found pyridine itself and its methyl derivatives. In his first paper on these researches he described how, from 300 pounds of bone oil, he obtained less than two pounds of basic substances and, on distillation, found picoline and a substance he called petinine in the two most volatile fractions.
In subsequent researches Anderson realized that he was working with too little material, and he eventually distilled about 250 gallons of bone oil. Finding methylamine and propylamine, and possibly ethylamine, he concluded that his petinine was in fact butylamine - thus finding this substance shortly before Wurtz did. After the discovery of pyridine, lutidine, and collidine, in that order, he came to the conclusion that these new bases formed a homologous series and that they were derived “from ammonia by the replacement of its three atoms of hydrogen by as many different radicals”. The modern ring formula for pyridine was first published by Dewar in 1872.
His later years were marred by a progressive neurological disease and he died on November 2, 1874.
In 1845 Anderson became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was also a member of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.
Anderson had a reputation of a painstaking worker, who possessed considerable manipulative skill; the exposition of his results is marked by extreme lucidity.
Physical Characteristics: By 1869 Anderson suffered from serious illness, and his last few years were marred by paralysis, deafness, as well as by occasional delirium.
In 1852 Thomas Anderson was married to Mary Barclay.