Dr. E. F. Armstrong, F.R.S

Abstract

EDWARD FRANKLAND ARMSTRONG, eldest son of the late Prof. H. E. Armstrong, died at the age of sixty-seven on December 14, after a short illness. A student in his father's laboratory at the Central Technical College, South Kensington, and afterwards with Emil Fischer at Berlin, he became much interested in the constitution of glucosides and related hexose derivatives, and in enzyme action. Later, when he had entered chemical industry, he found contact with other fields of research and, while his first objects of study never lost their hold (his last publication on carbohydrate chemistry, a contribution on polysaccharides in the “Annual Review of Biochemistry”, was in 1938), he was associated successively with work on fats, dyestuifs chemicals, industrial solvents, hydrogen and hydrogenation, gas and fuel. As time went on, his own contributions to research lessened and finally ceased, for his function became rather that of a stimulus to the investigations of others and, especially, that of a leader in chemical industry intimately concerned with the development and re-orientation of a number of undertakings in the period between the two world wars.