John Percy (metallurgist)
John Percy ( born March 23, 1817 in Nottingham, † June 19, 1889 in London) was an English physician, chemist and devoted himself as an engineer of metallurgy.
Life and work
Percy was a son of the jurist Henry Percy. His school days spent only on a private school in Southampton before - back in his Heimatststadt - at a secondary school heard medical- scientific lectures at William Grisenthwaite. Inspired by the chemistry, chemist Percy wanted to be, but according to the wishes of his father he had to study medicine. In April 1834 Percy went therefore with his brother Edmund to Paris.
After his first impressions of medical school, Percy was a student of Joseph Louis Gay -Lussac, Louis Jacques Thénard and Adrien Henri Laurent de Jussieu. At the suggestion of his teacher, he took 1836 study trips through Switzerland and Southern France, of which he brought with him many mineralogical and botanical samples. In the autumn of the same year he went to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied, among other things at Charles Bell. In 1838 he was able to successfully complete this study with a Dr. med. His dissertation on the change in the brain caused by alcohol poisoning was awarded a gold medal. During his stay in Edinburgh, he made friends among others with Eward Forbes.
In June 1839 he married Mary Grace in Birmingham († 1880), a daughter of John Edward Piercey of Warley Hall. In the same year he was called Percy as a physician to the Queen's Hospital ( Birmingham), but he never practiced there as a physician, but only held lectures on organic and pathological chemistry at Queen's College connected.
At this time, Percy interested almost exclusively for smelting and other metal-working processes of the local industry. From 1846 onwards he studied with David Forbes ( 1828-1876 ) and William Hallowes Miller ( 1801-1880 ); a focus were there crystallized slags.
He dealt only metal but also with the work processes in glass factories; inter alia, he attempted the work of Adolf Patera (1819-1894) in Joachimsthal and Russell in the U.S. to improve and develop.
1851 Percy took it as a Fellow in the Geological Society of London, and called in to the lecturer in metallurgy at the founded in the same year Government School of Mines and Science Applied to the Arts. There he made the acquaintance of Henry Thomas de la Bèche.
Since 1851, Percy lived with his wife in London in a stately property on Gloucester Crescent Hyde Park. He died on June 19, 1889 at the age of 72 years in London and found his final resting place.
Honors
Works (selection)
- Experiments on the presence of alcohol in the ventricles of the brain after poisoning by liquid did. 1839.
- On the manufacture of Russian sheet -iron. London, 1871.
- On the metallurgical treatment and assaying of gold ores. 2nd edition, London 1853.
- German translation: The metallurgy. Extraction and processing of metals and their alloys in practical and theoretical, especially chemical relationship. Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1872 ( translated by Friedrich Ludwig Knapp, Hermann Wedding and Karl Friedrich Rammelsberg )