what is william wollston
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William Hyde Wollaston PRS FRS (/ˈwʊləstən/; 6 August 1766 – 22 December 1828) was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium. He also developed a way to process platinum ore into malleable ingots.
He also made fundamental discoveries in many areas of science and discovered the elements palladium (1802) and rhodium (1804).
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Answer:
Wollaston was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, the son of the priest-astronomer Francis Wollaston (1737–1815) and his wife Althea Hyde. The family, which included 17 children, was financially well-off and were part of an intellectually stimulating environment. Wollaston was educated at Charterhouse School from 1774 to 1778 then studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1793 he obtained his doctorate (MD) in medicine from Cambridge University, and was a Fellow of his college from 1787 to 1828.[1]
He worked as a physician in rural areas between 1793 and 1797, then moved to London.[1] During his studies, Wollaston had become interested in chemistry, crystallography, metallurgy and physics. In 1800, after he had received a large sum of money from one of his older brothers, he left medicine. He concentrated on pursuing his interests in chemistry and other subjects outside his trained vocation.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1793, where he became an influential member. He served as president in 1820.[1] In 1822 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[2]
Wollaston never married. He died in London in 1828 and was buried in Chislehurst, England.[1][3]
Work
After having established a partnership with Smithson Tennant in 1800 in order to produce and sell chemical products, Wollaston became wealthy by developing the first physico-chemical method for processing platinum ore in practical quantities. He held the details of the process secret until near his death and made huge profits for about 20 years by being the only supplier in England of the product which had many of the same qualities as gold, but was much cheaper.[1]
Chemical analysis related to the process of purifying platinum led Wollaston to discover the elements palladium (symbol Pd) in 1802 and rhodium (symbol Rh) in 1804.[1]
Anders Gustav Ekeberg discovered tantalum in 1802; however, Wollaston declared it was identical with niobium (then known as columbium). Later Heinrich Rose proved in 1846 that columbium and tantalum were indeed different elements and he renamed columbium "niobium". (Niobium and tantalum, being in the same periodic group, are chemically similar.)
The mineral wollastonite was later named after Wollaston for his contributions to crystallography and mineral analysis.[1]
Wollaston also performed important work in electricity. In 1801, he performed an experiment showing that the electricity from friction was identical to that produced by voltaic piles.[4] During the last years of his life he performed electrical experiments, which resulted in his accidental discovery of electromagnetic induction 10 years prior to Michael Faraday, preceding the eventual design of the electric motor: Faraday constructed the first working electric motor and published his results without acknowledging Wollaston's previous work. Wollaston's demonstration of a motor to the Royal Society had failed, however, but nonetheless his prior work was acknowledged by Humphry Davy in the same paper which lauded Faraday's "ingenious" experiments.[5] Wollaston also invented a battery that allowed the zinc plates in the battery to be raised out of the acid, so that the zinc would not be dissolved as quickly as it would if it were in the battery all the time.
His optical work was important as well, where he is remembered for his observations of dark gaps in the solar spectrum (1802),[6][7] which eventually led to the identification of specific elements in the Sun. He invented the camera lucida (1807) which contained the Wollaston prism (the four-sided optics of which were first described basically by Kepler)[8] and the reflecting goniometer (1809). He also developed the first lens specifically for camera lens, called the meniscus lens, in 1812. The lens was designed to improve the image projected by the camera obscura. By changing the shape of the lens, Wollaston was able to project a flatter image, eliminating much of the distortion that was a problem with many of that day's biconvex lenses.
Wollaston also devised a cryophorus, "a glass container containing liquid water and water vapor. It is used in physics courses to demonstrate rapid freezing by evaporation."[9] He used his Bakerian lecture in 1805, On the Force of Percussion, to defend Gottfried Leibniz's principle of vis viva, an early formulation of the conservation of energy.
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