Elizabeth Fulhame

Elizabeth Fulhame was a British, specifically Scottish, chemist perhaps best known for her 1794 work An Essay on Combustion. The book details her experiments on oxidation-reduction reactions and catalysis. As the title implies it also concerned theories on combustion. The book is seen by some as a precursor to the work of Jöns Jakob Berzelius. That stated she focused more on water as a catalyst rather than heavy metals.

Her work was known in its time, as a description of it was written by Coindet, but aroused little interest. An exception being Irish chemist William Higgins who claimed that she had stolen his ideas. He also made similar claims against John Dalton.

Little is known of her outside of the work except that her husband was a doctor named Thomas. Also that in 1810 she was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society.

External links

* [http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:vEfMmjn4L3UJ:bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/newbeer/fulhame.pdf+%22ELIZABETH+FULHAME+AND+THE+DISCOVERY+OF+CATALYSIS:+100+YEARS+BEFORE%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&lr=lang_en Article from the University of Valencia]
* [http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/bibliogs/hws/hws0602.htm History of Women and Science from Wisconsin University]
* [http://www2.chass.ncsu.edu/wyer/dgbrandn.html The Women behind the men]