Pure Intelligence: The Life of William Hyde Wollaston [Hardcover]

William Hyde Wollaston made an astonishing number of discoveries in an astonishingly varied number of fields: platinum metallurgy, the existence of ultraviolet radiation, the chemical elements palladium and rhodium, the amino acid cystine, and the physiology of binocular vision, among others. Along with his colleagues Humphry Davy and Thomas Young, he was widely recognized during his life as one of Britains leading scientific practitioners in the first part of the nineteenth century, and the? deaths of all three within a six-month span, between 1828 and 1829, were seen by many as the end of a glorious period of British scientific supremacy. Unlike Davy and Young, however, Wollaston was not the subject of a contemporary biography, and his many impressive achievements have fallen into obscurity as a result.

Pure Intelligenceis the first book-length study of Wollaston, his science, and the environment in which he thrived. Drawing on previously-unstudied laboratory records as well as historical reconstructions of chemical experiments and discoveries, and written in a highly accessible style,Pure Intelligencewill help to reinstate Wollaston in the history of science, and the pantheon of its great innovators.

Melvyn C. Usselmanwas professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry at Western University in London, Ontario.

"He was crucial to the development of crystallography, and discovered the amino acid cystine and the elements palladium and rhodium. Yet scientific polymath William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) is largely forgotten. This meticulous biography, the life's work of late chemist Melvyn Usselman, reveals a man of indefatigable curiosity and methodological genius. As we see Wollaston crafting analytical instruments for Arctic expeditions, stargazing, or showing scientific writer Mary Somerville the uses of a goniometer, we can only concur with Usselman that this was a 'man worth knowing.'lÃ!