Glasgow Philosophical Society

Walter Crum in a paper read to the Glasgow Philosophical Society in 1843, mentions Hellot, etc., and Le Pileur d Apligny as teachii a physical theory, whilst Bergman and Berthollet held a chemical one. Crum proposed what is really a physical theory of adsorption, comparing the adhesion of the dye to a porous fabric with the adhesion of dissolved substances to charcoal. 

Thompson, W. (1S52). On the Economy of the Heating or Cooling of Buildings by Means of Currents of Air. Proceedings of the Philosophical. Society of Glasgow. 4 269-272. 

Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 

William Irvine was a native of Glasgow, matriculating at the university at the age of thirteen in 1756. Black soon noticed his interest in chemistry and his disposition to apply mathematics in his studies. Like Black, Irvine s main lines of communication for his work were through his students and the occasional excursion before the local Philosophical Society. Working as Black s assistant, Irvine helped in his professor s determination of the latent heat of steam and contributed values of that quantity for melting tin, zinc and spermaceti and beeswax. He also worked with Black on establishing experimentally the specific heats of various substances. However, Irvine became very much his own man. Andrew Kent puts it colourfully ... 

The power of Dalton s theory was appreciated by Thomas Thomson, of the Edinburgh and then Glasgow medical schools, who highlighted it in the third edition (1807) of his famous textbook, A System of Chemistry and who then did experiments to confirm that combination really did take place in the simple ratios Dalton had predicted. He convinced William Hyde Wollaston, one of the most eminent analysts of his day (known as The Pope because he was believed infallible) whose analyses of the various oxalates, published with Thomson s in the Royal Society s Philosophical Transactions (1808), confirmed Dalton s laws of chemical composition. Meanwhile, Thomson s book was translated into French and finally, Dalton himself published his theory in his New System of Chemical Philosophy, part 1 of which appeared in Manchester in 1808. Most of the volume is concerned with heat and the atomic theory occupies only the last few pages. We might have been able to follow his thinking more closely if the Lit Phil had not been bombed in World War II, and most of its records destroyed. 

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