Sydney Young (1857-1937) RALPH E. O E S P E R University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio
"B
LESSED is the nation that has no history." The life of Sydney Young contained no dramatic episodes. Day by day he pursued his activities, whose even tenor was broken only by the pleasurable excitement incident to the completion of a satisfactory experimental problem or the publication of a worth-while paper or book. A skilled manipulator, a lucid and logical thinker, a conscientious and meticulous worker, a far-seeing and fertile imagination-these were some of the factors that made him one of the most distinguished physical chemists of his generation. Sydney Young was born on December 29, 1857, a t Farmworth, Lancashiie. His father, a Liverpool merchant, was in comfortable circumstances and provided his son with a good private education. His chemical training was begun a t nearby Owens College (Mancheder), continued a t Strasbonrg, and then a t the University of London, where he received his Sc.D. in 1883. In 1882, Yonng was appointed Lecturer and Demonstrator a t University College, Bristol. His superior was Ramsay, who invited Young to collaborate in his studies of the change of state of solids and liquids. This partnership, in 5 years, produced more than 30 joint papers, and is commemorated in the well-known Ramsay-Young rule. In 1887, Ramsay succeeded Williamson a t Uni'versity College, London, and Young was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry a t Bristol. Young continued to work along similar lines of research, studying particularly the vapor pressures, specific volumes, and critical constants of a series of pure liquids. He recognized, of course, the folly of making accurate measurements on materials of doubtful purity, and the care and labor which he expended in purifying his samples, as well as the delicacy and fundamental soundness of his measurements, led to findings that are still accepted as of a high order of excellence. Timmermans, the Belgian authority on constants of pure compounds, wrote: "The perfect balance of all the factors involved in the precision of the final results makes such work a model of scientific probity. The attentive study of the publications of Sydney Young will always be a most useful school for all those who wish to put out work of permanent value on the determination of the true constants of pure organic compounds." The difficulties Young encountered in separating materials, especially in isolating pure hydrocarbons from petroleum by fractional distillation, led him to make a careful study of the whole process. He devised new methods of fractionation and invented excellent equipment. His skill as a glass blower enabled him to construct various forms of still heads,
whose performance he carefully compared. He became an international authority in this field and summed up his experiences first in the article "Distillation" in Thorpe's "Dictionary of Applied Chemistry," and then in his own "Fractional Distillation" (1903). The second edition (1922) was called "Distillation Principles and Processes" and contained invited chapt e n by six experts on industrial applications. The preface stated that the book was written "in the hope that it would be of assistance to chemists in overcoming the difficulties so frequently met with in the laboratory, not only in carrying out of the fractional distillation of a simple mixture but also in the interpretation of the results obtained." Besides his important and numerous studies on the equation of state of liquids, the equilibrium between the phases of pure materials, the relation of physical properties and chemical constitution, etc., Young also discovered new azeotropic mixtures. Particularly important were the ternary mixtures of the lower alcohols, benzene or n-hexane, and water. These systems were the basis of his very useful method of preparing absolute ethyl alcohol, now a commercial procedure. In 1903 Young was called to head the chemistry department a t Trinity College, Dublin. Though this was an advancement for him, it resulted in a loss to the progress of chemical knowledge. So much teaching and administrative work was put on Young that the broad stream of papers (over 100 in 2l.years) shrank to a trickle. However, his accumulated knowledge and wide experience were drawn on not only in his books on distillation, but also in his "Stoichiometry" (1908), which had a second edition in 1918. He was a successful teacher. Bailey described him as "a professor, who lectured with extreme clarity, who illustrated his lertures by blackboard drawings, which were the work of an artist (as indeed he was) and who, above all, set an example of old-world courtesy, which made the deepest impression on those who experienced it." On his retirement in 1928, Professor Young received an address from more than 200 friends, former pupils, and admirers of his work from all over the world. In 1933, he rekived a special letter of commendation from the Petroleum Division of the American Chemical Society for the excellent work he had done many years before on the separation of hydrocarbons and the determination of their physical constants. The usual honors came to him in full measure. Much of his leisure after retirement was spent a t his favorite hobby of gardening. He died a t his home near Bristol on April 9, 1937.
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