Harcourt, William Vernon

The first to respond publicly to Arago was the President of the British Association, the Reverend William Vernon Harcourt.77 The son of the Archbishop of York, an Oxford graduate with a strong interest in chemistry, and one of the founders of the Association, Harcourt used his Presidential Address to fight back. Although Harcourt did claim experimental and theoretical priority for Cavendish, he rested his case substantially upon the superior quality of what Cavendish had done ... 

It was, perhaps, not difficult for Brewster and the Rev. William Vernon Harcourt (son of the Archbishop of York, and formerly an auditor of Kidd s... 

Haber, Fritz, 129 Haller, Albin, 141, 148 Hammett, Louis, 221, 247, 271 Hannaway, Owen, 60 Hantzsch, Arthur, 54 Harcourt, Vernon, 120, 180, 275 Harkins, William, 239 Harman, Peter, 37... 

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. 

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). 

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