WOLLASTON, WILLIAM HYDE English chemist and natural philosopher, was born at East Dereham, Nor folk, on April 6, 1766. Wollaston was educated at Charterhouse, and afterwards at Caius college, Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1793 and became its secretary in 1896. He died in London on Dec. 22, 1828.
Most of Wollaston's original work deals more or less directly with chemical subjects, but diverges on all sides into optics, acoustics, mineralogy, astronomy, physiology, botany and even art. In chemistry he made a specialty of the platinum metals. Platinum itself he discovered how to work on a practical scale, and he is said to have made a fortune from the secret, which, how ever, he disclosed in a posthumous paper (1829) ; and he was the first to detect the metals palladium (1894) and rhodium (1895) in crude platinum. In 1899 he proved the elementary char acter of columbium (niobium) and titanium. In optics he was the first, in 1802, to observe the dark lines in the solar spectrum. Of the seven lines he saw, he regarded the five most prominent as the natural boundaries or dividing lines of the pure simple colours of the prismatic spectrum, which he supposed to have four primary divisions. He described the reflecting goniometer in 1809 and the camera lucida in 1812, provided microscopists with the "Wol laston doublet," and applied concavo-convex lenses to the pur poses of the oculist. His cryophorus was described in 1813, in a
paper "On a method of freezing at a distance." In 1821, after H. C. Oersted (1777-1851) had shown that a magnetic needle is deflected by an electric current, Wollaston attempted to trans form that deflection into a continuous rotation, and also to obtain the reciprocal effect of a current rotating round a magnet. He failed in both respects, and when Michael Faraday, who overheard a portion of his conversation with Davy on the subject, was subse quently more successful, he was inclined to assert the merit of priority, to which Faraday did not admit his claim.
In geological circles Wollaston is famous for the medal which bears his name, and which (together with a donation fund) is annually awarded by the council of the Geological Society of Lon don, being the result of the interest on Li,000 bequeathed by Wol laston for "promoting researches concerning the mineral structure of the earth." The first award was made in 1831.