Frankland Building

The memorial plaque is not the only tribute to the early history of biocatalysis at Birmingham. The Frankland Building commemorates Percy Frankland, who was professor of chemistry at Mason College, and whose views of biocatalysis have already been noted (Frankland, 1897). The Howarth Building commemorates the leader of the group at Birmingham responsible for their synthesis of L-ascorbic acid (Scheme 1.9). 

Chemists shared the euphoria. When Roscoe succeeded Frankland in 1857, he established a chemistry department that became one of the leading departments in the country, with new buildings (1872) that included his own private laboratory, two teaching laboraories, and more than twenty small research laboratories and staff rooms. By 1887, the number of students in the department had reached 120, and the department had an honors program for the best of them. One of Roscoe s assistants, Schorlemmer, a student of Heinrich Will and Kopp, was the first chair holder in organic chemistry in Great Britain, at Manchester, in 1874. Roscoe and Schorlemmer s A Treatise on Chemistry (1877) became a classic textbook.69... 

Environment Agency (2000) Risks of Contaminated Land to Buildings, Building Materials and Services. A Literature Review. R D Technical Report P331. Available from Environment Agency. R D Dissemination Centre, c/o WRc, Frankland Road, Swindon, Wilts SN5 8YF. ISBN 1 85705 2471. 

The development of valency arose from Berzelius theory of chemical combination which stressed [17, 18] the electronegative and electropositive character of combining atoms. In the mid-nineteenth century, Frankland, Kekule, Couper, Butlerov and Kolbe [19-26], building on the theory of radicals, developed the theory of valency in which elements in compounds were joined by an attraction of positive and negative poles. The concept of valency preceded the discovery of the electron and the planetary view of the atom and may be traced to the 1850 paper by Frankland [19, 24]. He combined the older theories of free radicals and type theory and demonstrated that elements have the tendency to combine with other elements to form compounds containing an integer number of attached elements, e.g. in the three attached atoms M/j, NI3, four attached atoms in CH4 and five attached atoms in PCls. Based on these examples and postulates, Frankland articulated the truism ... 

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