Williams, Charles Hanson Greville

After Bunsen had detected and isolated caesium, spectroscopy was taken up with great enthusiasm by William Crookes, and this led to his detection and isolation of thallium in 1861.191 Crookes letters to Charles Hanson Greville Williams, who was also working with the spectroscope, and who felt he deserved some of the credit for the discovery of thallium, have been published.192 The use of spectrochemistry in the search for hitherto unknown chemical elements in Britain over the period 1860-1869 has been described. It was perceived that, like Crookes, a scientist could make his reputation by discovering a new element. This resulted in several claims for the existence of new elements that later proved to be unfounded.193 Once Kirchhoff had established beyond doubt that the dark Fraunhofer lines were caused by the same element that caused emission lines of identical wavelengths, the way was open for the chemical analysis of the atmosphere of the sun and stars. This was a process which had been declared to be an impossibility by Auguste Comte less than 30 years previously.194... 

Crude rubber is primarily hydrocarbon in nature. In 1826 English chemist Michael Earaday (1791-1867) analyzed natural rubber and found it to have the empirical (simplest) formula C5H8, along with 2 to 4 percent protein and 1 to 4 percent acetone-soluble materials (resins, fatty acids, and sterols). In 1860 English chemist Charles Hanson Greville Williams (1829-1910) confirmed Earaday s analysis and in 1862 distilled natural rubber to obtain the pure monomer, which he named isoprene. He determined isoprene s vapor density and molecular formula, and he showed that it polymerizes to a rubbery product—an observation that led to the notion that rubber is a linear polymer of isoprene, proposed in 1910 by English chemist Samuel Shrowder Pickles (1878-1962). 

---