Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood ( born June 19, 1897 in London, † October 9, 1967 ) was a British chemist.

Life and work

Hinshelwood was educated at Westminster City School and later at Oxford University, where he received his doctorate. During World War II he worked in an explosives factory. Between 1921 and 1937 he was a lecturer at Trinity College. In 1937 he became professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford. Since 1929 he was a member of the Royal Society, over which he presided as President 1955-1960. The Royal Society awarded him the Royal Medal in 1947 and 1962 with the Copleymedaille from. In 1948 he was raised to the peerage, and in 1960 was awarded the Order of Merit. He was also president of the Chemical Society, the Faraday Society and since 1959 member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

His research interests included, among other things, kinetic studies of chemical reactions, especially the formation of water from the elements. Together with Harold Warris Thompson, he examined the explosive reaction of hydrogen with oxygen and described the phenomenon of chain reaction. For this work he received together with Nikolai Nikolayevich Semyonov 1956, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Later he investigated the chemical changes in bacterial cells, which were later in antibiotic research of great benefit. He has published this, inter alia, the books The Chemical Kinetics of the Bacterial Cell (1946) and Growth, Function and Regulation in Bacterial Cells ( 1966).

His name borne by the Langmuir -Hinshelwood mechanism, which describes the reaction of two precursors to a catalyst surface.

Hinshelwood was never married and spoke several languages ​​fluently. His hobbies included painting, Chinese pottery, as well as foreign-language literature.

On 17 April 2009, the International Astronomical Union named the moon crater Hinshelwood after him.