Sidney Gilchrist Thomas

Sidney Gilchrist Thomas ( born April 16, 1850 in Canonbury (London ); † February 1, 1885 in Paris ) was a British metallurgist.

Sidney Thomas learned a humanist education and was first clerk of the court. In his spare time he worked on chemistry, especially with metallurgy. He expanded his theoretical knowledge to evening schools, the tests at the Royal School of Mines, he was successful. The suggestion to deal with the problems of high-phosphorus iron ore is said to have Thomas get through a lecture. After many laboratory experiments, he found that the iron of the phosphorus may be withdrawn if you know the Bessemer converter with a basic lining of limestone with a small amount of water glass.

Together with his cousin, the chemist Percy Carlyle Gilchrist, he invented 1876/77 to a process for production of iron and steel from phosphorus -rich iron ore, which was named after him Thomas process. Industrial production by this method was introduced in England in May 1879 in the September 1879 Already in Germany.

Sidney Thomas had patented the use of the resulting slag, the Thomas flour, as a fertilizer.

Thomas died on 1 February 1885 in a sanatorium near Paris of tuberculosis.