Martin Lowry

Thomas Martin Lowry ( born October 26, 1874 in Low Moor, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England; † November 2, 1936 ) was an English chemist.

Life and work

Lowry studied chemistry under Henry Edward Armstrong, who mainly dealt in aqueous solutions with organic chemistry, but also with the chemistry of ions. 1896 Lowry became his assistant.

Lowry discovered in 1898 nitro -d -camphor, the change of the optical rotation with time and introduced the concept of a mutarotation to describe this phenomenon.

1906 Lowry became a lecturer in chemistry at Westminster Training College. In 1912 he went to Guy's Hospital Medical School, where he was head of the chemical division in 1913 and the first professor of chemistry at a London Medical School. In 1914 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1920 he became the first Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.

He studied the change in the optical rotation caused by acids or bases catalyzed reactions in camphor derivatives, which led him in 1923 to his definition of an acid-base theory, which he independently from the same formulation Johannes Nicolaus Brønsteds in the same year published ( now known as the acid-base definition by Brønsted and Lowry ).

By the end of his life, Thomas Lowry stayed in Cambridge.