Raphael Meldola

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Raphael Meldola’

Raphael Meldola (1754–1828) studied at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, and in 1872 was appointed Lecturer at the Royal College of Science where he worked on spectroscopy with Norman Lockyer, discoverer of helium. Three years later Meldola took charge of the British Eclipse Expedition to the Nicobar Islands and in 1885 accepted the post of Professor of Chemistry at Finsbury Technical College. Among his many honours he held a Fellowship at the Royal Society from 1886, on the recommendation of no less than Charles Darwin. In 1913 Meldola was awarded the Davy Medal, and he served as Vice-President of the Council from 1914–1915. The Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize is still awarded annually by the Royal Society of Chemistry ‘to British chemists who have conducted the most meritorious and promising original investigations in chemistry and published the results of those investigations’.

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Lighting-Up Time by Raphael Meldola

William Murdoch and Samuel Clegg brought warmth and light into the country’s streets, factories and homes, but the public didn’t make it easy.

Before natural gas there was coal gas, which warmed living rooms and lit streets all over the United Kingdom until the 1960s. Coal gas does not occur naturally, and Archibald Cochrane (1748-1831), 9th Earl of Dundonald, discovered it only by chance, while making coal tar near Culross Abbey in the 1780s. It fell to another Scotsman to make coal gas commercially viable.

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