WILLIAM ODLING, FARADAY'S SUCCESSOR SIDNEY ROSEN Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
J A m s DEWAR is often mentioned by chroniclers as the man who succeeded Michael Faraday as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry a t the Royal Institution. However, Fawday's successor was really William Odling, a chemist well known to the scientists of the time. Odling held the chair for five years, from 1868 (Faraday died in 1867) until 1873. Dewar was not appointed to the professorship until 1877; during the remaining interval, the chemist John Gladstone was Fullerian I'rofessor. William Odling is a particularly interesting personality, because he was, to quote one of his eulogizers, a scientist who had "lived through three generations of warring [chemists] . . . a front rank fighter among the first, a member of the general staff during the second, and an interested observer and wise counsellor at the end." Before his death in 1921, at the age of 92, he was still interested, still newly excited by such events as the ordering of the X-ray spectra by Mosely, and the rise of the new quantum physics. Odling was born in Southwark, England, in 1829. John Dalton was then still alive, and had turned his attention to the study of colorblindness. Faraday gave his first Bakerian Lecture that year, and a chemist named Graham had just published some interesting results about the diffusion of gases. Another baby, destined to greater fame than Odling, was born that same year in Darmstadt, Germany, to the Keknl6 family, and was named Friedrich. After his secondary schooling, young William entered St. Guy's Hospital as a medical student, determined to follow in the footsteps of his physician father. Chemistry, however, proved to he a lure he could not resist. Although he received his M.B. degree in 1851, he spent practically all of his active life as a chemist, and not as a doctor. The year of his graduation, he became Professor of Practical Chemistry a t the Hospital. He wrote later that the actual decision to become a professional chemist had been made in 1855. In that year, he was invited, as Secretary of the Chemical Society, to deliver a lecture a t the Royal Institution. He was not certain that he could rise to the occasion, and spent some sleepless nights preparing the lecture (it was on the constitution of hydrocarbons, a controversial problem).
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The immediate success of this lecture decided his career. The sales of a textbook he had written in 1854, Chemistry for Medical Students, soared. By 1876, the book had gone through five editions. But a new era in chemistry had begun with the work of two Continental chemists, Charles Frederic Gerhardt and Auguste Laurent. William Odling, attracted by their bold chemical theories, had attempted a translation of Laurent's Chemical Method, which was published in 1855. That same year, Odling left for Paris to attend school opened there by Gerhardt and Laurent. But i t was the year the school was destined to fail; Gerhardt left for Strashurg, and died there the following year. Upon his return to England, however, the young Odling found that he had acquired something of a reputation as a gifted exponeut of the new rhemistry. MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY CONTROVERSIES
The mid-nineteenth century mas an arena of struggle for various factions of chemists. Dalton's Table of Atomic Weights dominated the textbooks and the university lectures, and Gay-Lnssac's Law of Combining Volumes was still quite suspect. Avogadro's Hypothesis bad been forgotten by the older generation and was unknown to the younger. Problems involving chemical bonding, particularly the combining of organic radicals with elements like oxygen, hydrogen, and chlorine, invited many different solutions and caused bitter controversy. Great chemists insulted each other with the crude epithets of draymen. One of the famous practical jokes of the period was the submission of a communication by Wohler to Liebig's Annalen (in 1840) claiming to have replaced every single atom in a manganese acetate molecule by chlorine atoms. Wohler signed the letter S. C. H. Winder. Gerhardt and Laurent had worked out a system of classification of organic compounds called the "theory of types." Compounds were arranged in series, depending upon the type of reaction which had produced them. For example, the amines were "ammonia types," since they had been prepared by Hoffman through the reaction of ammonia upon the alkyl halides. Ethers, alcohols, and esters were "water types," because Williamson had shown them to occur as substitution products of water. Gerhardt had added 517
time. Unfortunately, Odling did not carry his conceptual scheme far enough; it remained for Mendeleev, in 1871, to predict the existence of the element germanium (as elcasilicon). William Odling was 29 years old, when Stanislao Cannizzaro, in 1858, shamed the chemical world into remembering that Avogadro had solved their greatest problem in 1811. The 47-year interval had brought new laboratory techniques and new evidence. I t took three years before Odling was finally convinced; hut in 1863, he fought tooth and nail against the old guard for the acceptance of Cannizzaro's work. On May 15, he read a paper before the Royal Institution on the composition of water, making his arguments dear and succinct:
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The uhotograph above, taken during t h e later years of his life, probably does not charactcriae the real Odling ss well as t h e following hit of dogserel, written by a waggish member of t h e Chemioal Society in 1863: "Odling, well k n o r n sioee boyhood's many h o u r s . . . And 1 return to find the quondam Ihd Hsth sprung to fame, and carryina on like mad. A Guy's professor M.B., nothing lesr, Our Secretary, and sn F.R.S.. Writin%s work ~ y m b o l i c dand quaint With names to test the palicnoe of a saiet:'
the "hydrochloric acid types" and the "hydrogen types," and had organized the whole into a single theory of classification. This theory, along with Gerhardt and Laurent's new table of atomic weights, was particularly singled out for abuse by members of the Liehig school. The two chemists had arrived a t a formulation of 0 = 16, C = 12, and S = 32, by reducing all formulas to a common volume basis (they used two volumes as a standard). William Odling was untiring in his efforts to get this new atomic weight table accepted by British chemists (who were, as a whole, reluctant to change from the dicta of their original hero, Dalton). When one considers that as late as 1893 there were still professors of chemistry writing Daltonian atomic weights on their blackboards, Odling's work appears heroic. In 1863, Odling accepted the Chair of Chemistry a t St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, a great step upward. The following year, he accomplished the one piece of work which merits the brief mention of his name in some histories of chemistry: he anticipated the periodic table of elements. As early as 1857, he had written a memoir on the natural grouping of elements in accordance with their atomic weights. But in 1864, he showed that when one compared carbon with members of the nitrogen family, there seemed to be one element missing in the tetrad place, a t atomic weight 72. Mendeleev's work was unknown in England a t the
Does the molecule of water consist of a single combining proportion of hydrogen having the relative weight 1, united with a single combining proportion of oxygen having the relative weight 8, or does it consist of two combining proportions of hydrogen each having the relative weight 1, united with a single combining proportion of oxygen having the relative weipht 16? In other words, ought the molecule of water to be represented by the formula HO',in which the 0' stands for 8 parts of weight in which the 0"stands for hy oxygen, or by the formula H30", 16 parts by weight of oxygen? The question is entirely one of fact. If the hydrogen of water is experimentally indivisible, it necessarily constitutes an indivisible proportion, or atomic proportion, or so-called atom. If, on the ather hand, it is experimentally divisible into two equal parts, it must consist of at leaat two atomic proportions, or two atoms.
Having made his point, he proceeded to demonstrate that H,O was undeniably the formula for the water molecule, and that this had been proposed by GayLussac and Berselius, and had been used by Humphrey Davy half a century before. SUCCESSOR TO MICHAEL FARADAY
In 1868, Odling was elected to succeed Faraday as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. He was then also Secretary of the Chemical Society, a Life Member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Though he did not possess Faraday's magnetic personality, Odling's lectures were popular because of his knack of explaining complicated concepts with clarity and simplicity. Carrying on a tradition begun by Faraday, Odling delivered three series of Christmas Lectures for Children: Chemical Changes of Carbon (1868-69), Burning and Unburning (1870-71), and Air and Gas (1872-73). Odling also did some work in applied chemistry as Examiner of the London water supply (a position he held in the 1870's). During a cholera epidemic a t Lamheth, he discovered that on one street the houses on one side had no cholera cases, while the disease had ravaged the houses across t,he way. Looking further into this strange situation, he found that the cholera victims were supplied with well-water, while the others received their water from the Thames. He then deduced that river water became purer.as i t flowed toward the mouth: a correct deduction, and an important factor in sewage control. Had the study of bacteriology been more advanced, the physician Odling might have made a great discovery, where the chemist Odling had made none. However, it remained for Robert Koch to return from India in 1884Tith the isolated cholera vibrio. The most unusual paper delivered by Odling during JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
his term as Fullerian Professor was "The Revived Theory of Phlogiston," given on March 28, 1871. More speculative than scientific, he probed the possibility of interpreting the principle of fire, or phlogiston, invented by Beccher and Stahl about 1700, in terms of energy. This lecture was far more romantic and flourishing in style than his usual terse reports. In America, Youmans was prompted to reprint the entire lecture in the September 1876 issue of the Popular Science Monthly. With the principle of the conservation of energy clearly established by the work of Mayer, Clausius, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Joule, Odling volunteered the following interchange between the words phlogiston and chemical energy: It is not our habit to say that charcoal and sulfur and lead are bodies possessing potential chemical energy, that is, phlogiston; that in the act of burning, their energy which was potential becomes kinetic ar dynamical, and is dissipated in the form of light and heat; that the products of their burning (including the gaseous product now known to be furnished by the burning of charcoal) are substances devoid of chemical energy, that is, of phlogiston; that when the acid substance furnished by burning sulfur is heated with charcoal, some energy of the unburnt charcoal ia transferred to the burnt sulfur, just as some energy of a raised weight may be transferred to a. fallen one, whereby the sulfur is unburnt, provided with energy, and enabled to burn again, snd the fallen weight is lifted up, provided with energy, and enabled to fall again; that the potential chemical energy of metallic lead did not originate in the lead, but is energy or phlogiston transferred thereto from the cbrtreaal by which i t was smelted; and lastly, that the chemical energy of the charcoal itself. its cmahilitv of burnine. its nower of doine work. in one
"A MAN WHO HAD BEEN AT THE MAKING OF THE SCIENCE HE TAUGHT"
Odling resigned the Fullerian Professorship in 1872 in order to accept the Wayneflete Professorship of Chemistry a t Oxford, succeeding Sir Benjamin Brodie in this post. At the University, Odling became a "beloved character," with idiosyncrasies still remembered by his former students. He considered working directly in the laboratory with his students distasteful, and hired a special "Aldrichian demonstrator" to deal with the laboratory classes. Though he did not discourage experimental research, he preferred the theoretical side of chemistry. He was once heard to remark that it was not etiquette for a professor to enter the chemistry laboratory. His lectures, and most of his life's work, coordinated and systematized the original work of others. Nevertheless, the students considered them "the lectures of a man who had been at the making of the science he taught." Upon his appointment to Oxford, he had married
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Elizabeth Mary Smee, daughter of the inventor of Smee's Cell. Of their three sons, only one, Marmaduke, became a chemist. Odling's intellectual interests were varied; he had an excellent collection of engravings, and he belonged to the Athenaeum and the Garrick Club. At the age of 80, he learned Spanish, so that he could address the Spanish Physical and Chemical Society upon his election as a honorary member. In 1912, he retired from active teaching; however, he then wrote and published a critique of poetry called The Technic of Versification. Like most of his writings, the text was full of symbolic notations, and contained almost no verbs. At the Jubilee Banquet of the Chemical Society in 1898, William Odling (along with Frankland and Williamson) was toasted as one of the founders of the New Chemistry. James Dewar said of him: The work of Odling has been an essential factor in the development of modern ehemistrv. It is eheraoterised bv ~reciseand
warm gratitude, and his many published works and addresses on organic chemistry, together with his translation of the work of Laurent, have all been of material service in diffusing a knowledge of our science. The papers he has contributed on chemical notation and an the question of types all display a mazvellaus precision as well as elegance of thought. Everyone must admit the debt of gratitude we owe him for his iconoclastio labours in clearing out old and vague notions, and for the courageous manner in which he supported the newer ideas of his time.
I t seems strange that no important original discoveries came from this man, apparently equipped with all the requirements for genius. Nevertheless, his greatness was an inseparable part of the development of the science of chemistry in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century. He was remembered by three generations of English chemists as the man who had been responsible for the acceptance of the ideas of Gerhardt, Laurent, and Cannizzaro. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank Mr. K. D. C. Vernon, Librarian of the Royal Institution, for his kind and most necessary assistance in suggesting biographical material and supplying both a list of Odling's works and references. Most of the biographical facts in this paper come from the two obituaries written about Odling: (1) by H. B. D. (H. B. Dixon?) in Proceedings of the Royal Society, See. A, 100 (1922) from which the photograph of Odling was taken; (2) by J. E. Marsh in the Journal of the Chemical Society (Transactions) 119,553-64 (1921).
