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History - People - George Fownes

George Fownes

George Fownes

Tenure:

Those of us who have been associated with UCL Chemistry for some time know the litany of the early professors of the Department by heart: Turner, Graham, Williamson, Ramsay, Collie, Donnan etc. In those days, Professors were few and far between and it is therefore a surprise to discover the existence of one more who seems not to have been mentioned in College literature since the 1920's.

A copy of "Rudimentary Chemistry for use of Beginners" published in 1854 lists "George Fownes, Late Professor of Practical Chemistry at University College, London" as the author. The preface states that the book was written in Barbados, of all places. Who was Fownes and why was he writing books in Barbados?

George Fownes was born in London on 14 May 1815, one of eight brothers and three sisters. His father, John Fownes, was a successful London glover whose business flourished during the 19th century and continued in various locations in the UK until 1974. The Fownes factory building in Worcester is now a hotel. Educated first in Enfield and then in France at Bourbourg, Fownes returned to England at 17 where his father fully expected him to enter the family business.

However "having an inherent attachment to the pursuits of Science, those of business proved so irksome and distasteful to him, that we has soon induced to relinquish them, and to adopt Chemistry as his profession". He joined the Western Literary Institution in Leicester Square, one of several competitors of the Royal Institution which had been founded in 1825 to promote "the diffusion of useful knowledge among person engaged in Commercial and Professional pursuits", and which counted several chemists amongst its members. There he made a name for himself as a demonstrator and by 1837 had become a student of Thomas Everitt, the Professor of Chemistry at the Middlesex Hospital. He travelled to Germany in 1838 where he matriculated at the University in Giessen on 13 August.

He studied German and carried out his doctoral work under the supervision of the great Justus Liebig, inventor both of elemental microanalysis and of the eponymous beef extract and father of agricultural chemistry. It was in Giessen that Fownes developed an interest in the connexions between chemistry and agriculture, which feature so prominently in his "Rudimentary Chemistry" and his other books. Fownes' thesis was entitled "On the Equivalent of Carbon". In his thesis he determined the equivalent weight of carbon from the combustion of naphthalene, obtaining a value which refuted Berzelius' accepted value as being too high and the precision of which illustrates his skills as an analyst. He graduated from the Philosphical Faculty with his doctorate on 4 August 1841.

Returning to England, Fownes became Thomas Graham's assistant at UCL. He then held lectureships at the Charing Cross and Middlesex Hospitals before becoming Professor of the Pharmaceutical Society in 1842 at the age of 27. This precocity, and his excellence as a lecturer, led him to being invited to give a series of lectures on organic chemistry at the RI. Perhaps to accompany this lecture series, he wrote a book with the memorable title "Chemistry, As Exemplifying the Wisdom and Beneficence of God" which won the RI's Actonian Prize. In arguments written some 15 years before Darwin's Origin of Species and which continue to be revived, most recently in the row about "Intelligent Design", Fownes argued that Science in general and chemistry in particular would provide definitive evidence for the role of a "great Contriver". "The recent discoveries of chemistry, more especially in its relations to animal and vegetable physiology, lead to the hope that it may be possible to draw an inference of design from the chemical constitution of the earth and its inhabitants..."

It was during this time that he carried out his most significant work. He isolated "benzoline" (hydroxybenzamide) from bitter almond oil and wrote "An account of the artificial formation of vegeto-alkali", the isolation of furfuramide by the action of sulfuric acid on bran. These two works earned him election to the Royal Society on 13 February 1845. He also wrote his most famous and influential book "A Manual of Elementary Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical" which ran to many editions until the late 19th century (after which it lived on under a new name edited by his old friend Henry Watts whom he had first met at the Western Literary Institution) . Two rather battered copies lie in our archive and a couple more are in the College Library.

His health, however, was failing and he developed breathing problems that made lecturing increasingly difficult. He resigned first from the Middlesex in 1845 and then from the Professorship at the Pharmaceutical Society the following year. He had, in the meanwhile taken up the Professorship at the Birkbeck Chemistry Laboratory at University College (shown at right) - which had opened in 1841 - where he worked alongside his old boss Thomas Graham who was Professor of Chemistry and Henry Watts, his assistant. In 1847 he was awarded the Medal of the Royal Society for his work on benzoline, but by now he was seriously ill. He travelled to Switzerland first and then to Barbados in the hope that this might restore his lungs to health. Unfortunately this had no effect and he died "of a severe chill" at his home in Brompton on 31 January, 1849 at the age of 33.

Although dismissed by Collie as "not a chemist of great importance" it must be remembered that he was active in chemistry for less than a decade, much of it whilst ill. In that time he not only published about twenty papers but also a major textbook, which was widely read for almost half a century. Furthermore, as Secretary of the Chemical Society he argued strenuously for the construction of laboratories so that students would not have to travel abroad to learn chemistry, a practice which, however, continued well after his death - indeed each of his successors at UCL, Williamson, Ramsay, Collie and Donnan studied with Liebig, Thieme, Fittig, and Wislicenus respectively in Germany. After his death, Fownes' books were donated to the College by his father and formed the core of the Library's Special Collection in Chemistry. Sadly however the bulk of his letters and papers were destroyed in World War II by the bombing of the College. And so we are left to wonder what might have been if George Fownes had lived until three score years and ten.

J. S. Rowe wrote a short biography of Fownes "The Life and Works of George Fownes" Annals of Science, 6: 4, 422 - 435 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033795000202101)

Publications

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This page last modified 20 September, 2010

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