- James Walker (chemist)
Sir James Walker (
6 April 1863 –6 May 1935 ) was a Scottish chemist.Born in
Dundee , he was educated at theHigh School of Dundee , and though had passed the entrance examination for theUniversity of St Andrews at sixteen, he instead went for three years to theflax industry, entering theUniversity of Edinburgh in 1882, graduating B.Sc. in 1885 and D.Sc. in 1886. He then spent three years in Germany, working withLudwig Claisen ,Adolf von Baeyer andWilhelm Ostwald . Following a Ph.D at theUniversity of Leipzig in 1889, he returned to Britain, working in Edinburgh andUniversity College, London , before being appointed professor of chemistry at theUniversity of Dundee in 1894. In 1908 he returned to Edinburgh to succeedAlexander Crum Brown as professor.Walker's main research interest was in
physical chemistry . He investigated methods ofelectrolysis in the synthesis ofdicarboxylic acid s, the dissociation constants of acids and bases, and measuredmolecular weight s byfreezing point depression. While he is personally credited with no truly major discoveries, his most important role was as a populariser of the new and controversial physical chemistry theories of Ostwald,van't Hoff andArrhenius in the English speaking world. This he did through his 1890 translation of Ostwald's "Grundriss der allgemeinen Chemie (Outlines of General Chemistry)", and his own textbook "Introduction to Physical Chemistry" (1899), which became a set text in many British universities.Walker was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1900, and was awarded aDavy Medal in 1926.References
*H. W. Melville, ‘Walker, Sir James (1863–1935)’, rev. W. H. Brock,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ,Oxford University Press , 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36693 doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/56154] , accessed 13 Feb 2008
*cite journal
title = Sir James Walker. 1863-1935
author = J. Kendal
journal = Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society
volume = 1
issue = 4
year = 1935
pages = 536–549.
url = http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1479-571X%28193512%291%3A4%3C536%3ASJW1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P
doi = 10.1098/rsbm.1935.0017
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