Book reviews - Lancastrian chemist: the early years of Sir Edward Frankland

Abstract

Colin A. Russell, Lancastrian chemist: the early years of Sir Edward Frankland . Open University Press, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1986. Pp. ix + 187. £35.00. ISBN 0-335-15175-2. If the child is father of the man, biographers of eminent scientists have an obligation to study their early years with particular care, identifying the social and intellectual preconditions that made a career in science possible. Few have done so with the tenacity, the immersion in local archives and the detective skills that Professor Russell displays in this first of a two-volume biography. For historians of chemistry, Frankland was a 19th century innovator of the first rank. As a theorist, he articulated one of the earliest conceptions of valency; as a practitioner, he opened up the new field of organo-metallics; and as exemplar of a new generation of scientific professionals he became the nation’s authority on a subject that has lost nothing of its topicality - river pollution and the quality of domestic water.