Harcourt, Augustus Vernon

Wilhelmy s work remained largely unnoticed until Ostwald drew attention to it over 30 years later. In the meantime, three pairs of workers had performed important work on reaction kinetics and chemical equilibria. They were the Frenchmen Berthelot and Leon Pean de Saint-Gilles (1832-1863), the Norwegians Cato Maximilian Guldberg (1836-1902) and Peter Waage (1833-1900), and the Englishmen Augustus Vernon Harcourt (1834-1919) and William Esson (1839-1916). 

Augustus George Vernon Harcourt and William Esson... 

The first non systematic introduction of thermodynamics in Chemical Kinetics is due to the second couple of scientists previously cited Augustus George Vernon Harcourt (1834-1919) and William Esson (1839-1916). Harcourt was an important chemist, member of the Royal society and president of Chemical society, Esson a mathematician and Savilian professor of Geometry. They worked at University of Oxford in a period particularly fruitful for Sciences in Britain. It is the peak of positivism and at the time different sciences, included chemistry, got clearly distinct university courses. Their activity covered a period of fifty years and represented the main passage from natural philosophy speculations to modern scientific reasoning. Influenced by Van t Hoff they will definitively abandon ambiguous terms like Affinity and Chemical Forces. 

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