John Bennet Lawes

Sir John Bennet Lawes ( born December 28, 1814 Rothamsted, Hertfordshire, † August 31, 1900 ) was a British agricultural chemist.

He was owner of a Gutsbetriebes at Rothamsted, where he 1843 agrikulturchemisches laboratory einrichtete and this property founded together with the agricultural chemist Joseph Henry Gilbert the Rothamsted Experimental Station.

First Lawes worked on the production of artificial fertilizers ( fertilizers ). In 1842 he succeeded for the first time to produce superphosphate by digestion of bone meal with sulfuric acid. For this and notified on May 23, 1842 he received a patent process.

Lawes was, as Justus von Liebig, a staunch supporter of the theory of mineral nutrition of plants. With its first 1843 -represented thesis that existing in the form of ammonia in the atmosphere nitrogen quantities sufficient for the nutrition of plants, however, he could not make friends. Therefore, he put in many years at Rothamsted field experiments designed to disprove this thesis nitrogen - Liebig. In the following decades, a fierce scientific dispute developed on the published results of Bennet mostly in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England Liebig responded with violent, sometimes polemical refutations.

However, the results of Rothamsteder duration fertilization trials were consistent with the experience of agricultural practices are largely the same and found world's highest recognition. In the second half of the 19th century leading German agriculture scientists traveled to Rothamsted and reported in professional journals in detail about these tests.

In 1854 he was elected as a member of the Royal Society, in 1867, the Royal Medal awarded him.