James Dewar and His Route to the Liquefaction of Hydrogen

Abstract

In the 1840s Kincardine was a small port on the river Forth above Edinburgh where the local inn, the Unicorn, was kept by Thomas Dewar and his wife Ann. They had seven sons, of whom six survived infancy, and the last of whom, James, was born in 1842. He was educated first at the local school and then, after the death of both parents, at the nearby Dollar Institution (now Dollar Academy). In 1859 he went to Edinburgh University where he studied under the physicist Guthrie Tait and the chemist Lyon Playfair. As was usual for students from financially modest backgrounds, he took no degree but served as an assistant to Playfair and later to his successor, Crum Brown. His earliest research was in organic chemistry and physiology but he spread himself widely and published steadily, so creating a reputation as an active and coming young man. He applied unsuccessfully for the Regius Chair of Chemistry at Glasgow in 1874, but was then a candidate for the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge where, in 1875, the electors were looking primarily for someone who could teach chemistry to medical students, but where the wide but obsolete conditions of the endowment allowed the occupant considerable freedom to choose his own field of teaching and research. The resources immediately available to the new professor were, however, even less than Dewar had been accustomed to in Edinburgh, so when the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution in London was advertised in March 1877 he applied for that also. He was again successful and held both chairs for the rest of his life. The resources of the Royal Institution, or the RI as it was commonly known, proved over the years to be greater than anything that he could probably have mustered in Cambridge in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He gave his statutory lectures at Cambridge, and cooperated with George Liveing, the Professor of Chemistry, in a long series of papers on visible and ultraviolet spectroscopy. He was assisted there also by a series of Demonstrators with whom he maintained his interest in organic chemistry but, from 1877, the centre of his research was firmly established in London at the Royal Institution.