Walter Weldon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter Weldon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 31 October 1832 |
| Died | 20 September 1885 (aged 52) |
Walter Weldon FRS FRSE (31 October 1832 – 20 September 1885) was a 19th-century English industrial chemist and journalist. He was President of the Society of Chemical Industry from 1883-84.[1]
He was born in Loughborough on 31 October 1832, the son of Reuben Weldon and his wife, Esther Fowke.[2]
Weldon was brother to Ernest James Weldon, founder of Weldon & Wilkinson Ltd. [3]
In 1854 he began work as a journalist in London with The Dial (which was afterwards incorporated in The Morning Star), and in 1860 he started a monthly magazine, Weldon's Register of Facts and Occurrences relating to Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, which was later discontinued.[4] In the 1860s he turned to industrial chemistry, described below. However, he is remembered for his pattern work.
His publications in the late 1800s were through Weldon & Company, a pattern company who produced hundreds of patterns and projects for numerous types of Victorian needlework. In about 1885, Weldon & Company started to publish monthly 14-page needlework newsletters, each covering one needlework technique. These were affordable, at 2 pence each. In 1888, the company began to collect these newsletters in groups of 12, publishing them a series of books entitled Weldon's Practical Needlework, each volume consisting of the various newsletters (one year of publications) bound together with a cloth cover and costing 2s. 6d.[5]
Weldon's Ladies' Journal (1875–1954) supplied dressmaking patterns, and was a blueprint for subsequent 'home weeklies'.
In 1877 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Alexander Crum Brown, Sir James Dewar, John Hutton Balfour and Sir Andrew Douglas Maclagan. In 1882 he was further elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.[2]
Weldon was interested in parapsychology, and was a spiritualist and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.[6][7]
Family
Weldon married Anne Cotton in 1854. Their second son was Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, an English evolutionary zoologist and biometrician.
