Edmund Ronalds
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edmund Ronalds | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 18 June 1819 |
| Died | September 9, 1889 (aged 70) |
| Occupation(s) | academic, industrial |
| Spouse |
Barbara Christian Tennent
(m. 1850) |
| Children | 6 |
| Relatives |
|
Edmund Ronalds FCS FRSE (18 June 1819 – 9 September 1889) was an English academic and industrial chemist. He was co-author of a seminal series of books on chemical technology that helped begin university teaching of chemical applications for industry, and was a pioneer in the incorporation of advanced research into a manufacturing firm.
He was born on 18 June 1819 at 48 Canonbury Square in Islington.[1] His father Edmund Sr was a London cheesemonger and the brother of inventor Sir Francis Ronalds and his mother Eliza Jemima was the daughter of Dr James Anderson, who ran a respected school in Hammersmith.[2][3] For most of his childhood the family lived at Brixton Hill but they returned to Islington in 1839 and resided at the east end of Canonbury Place.
He was the eldest of at least 12 children. Five of his siblings moved to New Zealand in the 1850s where his sisters married brothers of Harry Atkinson.[4] Another sister spent her last years in Algiers. Two siblings married into Samuel Greg's cotton-spinning family.[1][3]
Education and career
Ronalds' university education was conducted principally in Germany. His key supervisors for his subsequent career were philosophy professor Jakob Friedrich Fries of the university of Jena, Gustav Magnus, the professor of physics and technology at the University of Berlin, and chemistry professor Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1842.[1]
On returning home in 1842, he became assistant to Professor Thomas Graham at University College London. He then held lectureships in chemistry simultaneously at the Aldersgate Medical School and the Middlesex Hospital School of Medicine.[1] In 1849 he was appointed as the inaugural professor of chemistry at Queen's College Galway (now NUI Galway).
Ronalds resigned his chair at Galway in 1856 to run the Bonnington Chemical Works, where the residues from the manufacture of coal gas at the Edinburgh gasworks were processed into valuable products.[5] His partners in the company were John Tennant, eldest son of industrialist Charles Tennant, and John Tennent, whose father Hugh Tennent had helped run the Tennent family's Wellpark Brewery. Hugh Ronalds, a brother of Edmund Ronalds, later also became a partner at Bonnington. Edmund finally closed the works in 1878, when he was suffering extended ill health and Tennent and Tennant had died.[1]
