Percy F. Frankland

Percy Faraday Frankland CBE FRS[1] (3 October 1858 – 28 October 1946) was a British chemist.[2]

Mason Science College, now the University of Birmingham

He was the second son and youngest child of Edward Frankland, chemist, and Sophie Fick, sister of Adolf Eugen Fick. He was born at 42 Park Road, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, on 3 October 1858.[3] Michael Faraday was his godfather.[4]

Letter from Frankland (1886)

Frankland attended University College School from 1869-1874. The following year he was admitted to the Royal School of Mines, where he was taught by his father, Frederick Guthrie, T H Huxley, Judd and Warington Smyth[5]

Although he gained a Brackenbury scholarship to St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1878, and graduated with a BSc three years later, he was steered away from medicine to chemistry by his father. He studied for a PhD under Johannes Wislicenus at the University of Würzburg. Frankland returned to London in 1880, and became a demonstrator of practical chemistry at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington.[6]

Frankland left London in 1888 to become Professor of Chemistry at Dundee, where his main scientific interests were in stereochemistry and in the preparation of pure cultures of bacilli, which were allowed to grow in solutions of sugars. Together with his wife, Grace Frankland, they isolated the first pure culture of nitrifying (ammonia-oxidizing) bacterium in 1890.[7]

He then went to Birmingham in 1894 as Professor of what was then Mason College, where he succeeded Professor William A. Tilden. Frankland retired at the end of the First World War, aged 60. A list of his publications, from 1880-1920 is included in the Royal Society memoir.[1]

Frankland was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1891.[8] He was President of the Chemical Society from 1911 to 1913, a position his father had held before him.[4] He was awarded the Royal Society's Davy Medal in 1919.

  1. ^ a b Garner, William Edward (1948). "Percy Faraday Frankland. 1858-1946". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 5 (16): 697–715. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1948.0007. JSTOR 768766. S2CID 177495132.
  2. ^ Garner, W. E. (1948). "Obituary notice: Percy Faraday Frankland, 1858-1946". Journal of the Chemical Society (Resumed): 1996–2005. doi:10.1039/JR9480001996.
  3. ^ "Frankland, Percy Faraday". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33244. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ a b Garner, W. E. (1948). "Obituary notice: Percy Faraday Frankland, 1858-1946". Journal of the Chemical Society (Resumed): 1996. doi:10.1039/JR9480001996. ISSN 0368-1769.
  5. ^ Garner, W E (May 1948). "Percy Faraday Frankland. 1858-1946". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 5 (16): 697–715. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1948.0007. S2CID 177495132.
  6. ^ For an explanation of the name of the constituents The Royal Schools of Chemistry and Mines see footnote 11 in Forgan, Sophie; Gooday, Graeme (December 1996). "Constructing South Kensington: The Buildings and Politics of T. H. Huxley's Working Environments". The British Journal for the History of Science. 29 (4). Cambridge University Press: 435–468. doi:10.1017/S0007087400034737. PMID 11618471.
  7. ^ "V. The nitrifying process and its specific ferment.—Part I". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 181: 107–128. 31 December 1890. doi:10.1098/rstb.1890.0005. ISSN 0264-3839.
  8. ^ "Lists of Royal Society Fellows 1660-2007". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 18 July 2010.