Royal Academy

Trevor A. Kletz, D.Sc., Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Chemical Engineering, Loughborough University, U.K. Fellow, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Royal Academy of Engineers (U.K.), Institution of Chemical Engineers (U.K.), and Royal Society of Chemistry (U.K.) (Section 26, Process Safety)... 

Parry-Jones, R. 1999 Engineering for Corporate Success in the New Millennium. The Royal Academy of Engineering - The 1999 Engineering Manufacture Lecture. 

Siemens constructed the first electric railway shown at the Berlin Trade Fair of 1879 and the first electrically-operated lift m 1880, and the first electric trams began operating in Berlin in 1881. Siemens received many honors for his work an 1860 hon-oraiy doctorate from the University of Berlin, an 1873 membership m the Royal Academy of Science, and an 1888 knighthood from Emperor Friedrich III. Siemens died m Berlin, Charlotteiiburg, on December 6, 1892. 

Although Don Francisco was rather reluctant to get involved in the formal activities of academies, he accepted membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain. He was not an outstanding speaker, but his straightforward manner and direct approach to the subject he was dealing with made... 

Fortunately for a poor, would-be chemist like Leblanc, France s aristocratic passion for the physical sciences crossed economic, social, and political borders. Intellectuals such as Rousseau and Diderot cultivated the sciences with enthusiasm and compiled encyclopedias and dictionaries of natural substances. Local academies and institutes in the far-flung provinces sponsored chemical studies. Crowds flocked to hear chemists lecture and to watch their flashy laboratory demonstrations. Even the future revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, experimented with fire, electricity, and light and tried—in vain—to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In America, Benjamin Franklin abandoned his printing and publishing business for physics, and in England his friend Jane Marcet wrote Mrs Marcet s Conversations in Chemistry for women and working-class men. 

In the midst of the excitement, Leblanc told his former chemistry professor, Jean Darcet, the fabulous secret of his discovery. After running some tests and confirming Leblanc s discovery, Darcet recommended it to their patron, the Duke of Orleans. So far the process had worked only in laboratory crucibles, but Darcet declared optimistically, I the undersigned, professor of chemistry at the Royal College of France and at the Royal Academy of Sciences, etc., certify that. . . with this same process, it will be easy to establish a factory. As is often the case, reality proved to be a trifle more complicated. 

Letter from Christopher Ingold to Prevost, dated 29 July 1946 and a letter from the Secretary of the Nobel Committees of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to Prevost, dated 16 January 16 1954. Copies of these letters were given to me by Constantin Georgoulis, who completed a doctoral dissertation at Paris in 1960 on the kinetic study of reaction schemas for allylic transpositions, under the direction of Prevost. Another of Georgoulis s teachers was Paul Job, cousin of Andre Job. 

The war period was not one of scientific inactivity. The publication record of Ilya Prigogine contains 13 papers on thermodynamics published between 1940 and 1944 in the Bulletin of the Royal Academy of Belgium, in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Belgium, and in the Journal de Physique et le Radium (France). One learns from the acknowledgments of these papers that the young researcher was subsidized by the Solvay Institutes. 

Guillaume-Franeois Rouelle, 1703—1770. Parisian apothecary. Former inspector-general of die pharmacy at the City Hospital. Demonstrator in chemistry at the Royal Botanical Garden. Member of the Royal Academies of Science of Paris and Stockholm and of the Electoral Academy of Erfurt. Born in the village of Mathieu two leagues from Caen September 16, 1703, died at Passy Aug. 3, 1770. (Translated from the French caption on the frame.) See also ref. (62). 

Leibniz communicated Brand s method of making phosphorus to Count Ehrenfried Walter von Tschimhaus (1651-1708) in Paris, and sent him a specimen by request. When Count E. W. von Tschimhaus (58) published die Brand-Leibniz recipe in the history of the Royal Academy, Colbert recommended him for membership in the French... 

According to Zenz6n, Brandt stated in his diary for 1741 (which was not edited until 1744)- As there are six kinds of metals, so I have also shown widi reliable experiments, in my dissertation on the half-metals which I presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Upsala in 1735, that diere are also six kinds of half-metals. The same dissertation shows that I, dirough my experiments, had the good fortune. . to be the first... 

Because of its relation to saltpeter, P.-J. Macquer regarded nitric acid as a kind of sulfuric acid modified by its passage through animal and vegetable substances. In 1750, said he, the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin proposed an account of the generation of Nitre as the subject for their prize, which was conferred on a Memoir wherein this last opinion was supported by some new and very judicious experiments (8). Macquer stated that the Nitrous [nitric] Acid is never found but in earths and stones which have been impregnated with matters subject to putrefaction. (8). 

In 1778 Scheele published his analysis of the so-called lead ore (molybdenite), then known as molybdaena. I do not mean the ordinary lead ore, said he, that is met with in the apothecaries shops, for this is very different from that concerning which I now wish to communicate my experiments to the Royal Academy. I mean here that which in Cronstedt s Mineralogy is called molybdaena membranacea nitens and with which Qvist and others probably made their experiments. The kinds I had occasion to submit to tests were got in different places, but they were all found to be of the same nature and composed of the same constituents ... 

In the meantime Tennant continued his researches, and the results which he communicated to the Royal Academy in the spring of 1804 showed that the powder contains two new metals, which may be separated by the alternate action of acid and alkali. One of these he named iridium because its salts are of varied colors, and the other he called osmium because of its odor (20). 

From 1875 to 1895 J.D. van der Waals was a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Science. In 1908, at the age of 71, J. D. van der Waals resigned as a professor. During his life J. D. van der Waals was honored many times. He was one of only 12 foreign members of the Academie des Sciences in Paris. In 1910 he received the Nobel prize for Physics for the incredible work he had done on the equations of state for gases and fluids—only the fifth Dutch physicist to receive this honor. J. D. van der Waals died on March 8, 1923 at the age of 85. 

Rene Fric, Contribution a I etude de revolution des idees de Lavoisier sur la nature de Fair et sur le calcination des metaux, Arch. Int. d Hist. Sci. 12 (1959) 137-168. This paper printed three previously unpublished manuscripts by Lavoisier. The first is titled Essay sur la nature de Fair, and is dated only by the note of Pouchy, the permanent secretary of the Royal Academy, on 19 August 1772 the second has the same title and is dated in Lavoisier s own hand as 15 April 1773 the third, Sur une nouvelle theorie de la calcination et de la reduction des substances metalliques sur la cause de Faugmentation de poids quelles aquirent au feu et sur differens phenomenes qui appartiennent a Fair fixe carries no date, but Fric assigns as probable 21 April 1773. Quotation from the second Fric Memoire, 150. 

The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, and other professional organizations scathingly criticized the committee s 1997 report Towards a Sustainable Chemicals Policy.7 Expert criticism meant little to the Minister of Environment at that time (now Minister of Foreign Affairs), Anna Lindh, who, in the case of the alleged dangerous properties of PVC, declared that she had more confidence in Greenpeace than in the Academy of Sciences. 

We wish to thank J. Champoux for additional checking of the synthesis and M. J. Doedee for recording 195Pt NMR spectra. V. Yu. K. is grateful to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences of Russia for financial support of his stay at the Lund University. 

We are indebted to the many postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers who have contributed to the work in these areas notably Peter Price, Kate Shorrock, Dominic Jackson, James Mdoe, John Rafelt and Sjack Elings. We also thank our many sponsors notably the EPSRC, Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, the European Union and UK and European Industry. 

DJM thanks the Royal Society for a University Research Fellowship, JHC thanks the Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC for a Fellowship... 

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