Odling, William
ODLING, WILLIAM
(b. Southwark, London. England, 5 September 1829; d. Oxford, England, 17 February 1921)
chemistry.
Before Odling became Waynflete professor of chemistry at Oxford, where he was a conscientious teacher but personally uninterested in the emergence of a research school, he had been (with A. W. Williamson, B. C. Brodie, and E. Frankland) one of England’s leading theoretical chemists during the exciting renaissance of British chemistry between 1850 and 1870. The only son of George Odling, a London doctor with a long family tradition of medicine, he received his elementary schooling at Stockwell and then at the interesting Nesbit’s Chemical Academy and Agricultural College, where he gave his first public lecture in 1844.1 He entered Guy’s Hospital at the age of sixteen and was one of the hospital’s first students to take the London University M.D. in 1851.
Although Odling attended A. W. Hofmann’s course at the Royal College of Chemistry for a semester in 1848, his principal chemistry teacher, who initially biased him toward toxicological studies, was Alfred Swaine Taylor (1806–1880), the Guy’s lecturer in chemistry and medical jurisprudence. Odling held several teaching positions at Guy’s while he was medical officer of health for Lambeth from 1856 to 1862. From 1863 to 1870 he taught chemistry at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and, on Faraday’s death in 1867, became Fullerian professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, whereupon he abandoned applied medicine except for remunerative work on water analysis. On succeeding Brodie at Oxford in 1872 he married Elizabeth Mary Smee; they had three sons. He retired in 1912 but remained active until the end of his life.
Through his long and influential association with the Chemical Society, which he joined in 1848, Odling became a close friend and overmodest “follower” of Brodie and of the older and authoritative Williamson. Through the latter he met Kekulé during his Wanderjahre in London (1854–1855). All these men had been stimulated by the revolutionary French chemistry of C. Gerhardt and A. Laurent. On the latter’s death in 1853 Williamson recommended Odling to Biot (Laurent’s editor) as the English translator of Laurent’s posthumous masterpiece, Méthode de chimie. The few months Odling spent in Paris with Gerhardt in 1854 completed his chemical education. Thereafter he and Williamson became the formidable British spokesmen for the type theory and for two-volume formulas (such as H2O for water instead of the prevailing confusion of HO or H4O2).
Laurent and Gerhardt also induced Odling’s lifelong interest in the problems of classifying chemical compounds and of exploiting their analogies. Unlike Williamson, however, who believed in the existence of atoms, Odling was sufficiently influenced by Brodie’s skepticism to remain uncommitted to atomism per se. Like Gerhardt he preferred to regard formulas as heuristic devices, and he had only harsh words for the pictorial “fancies” involved in the graphic formulas of A. Crum Brown and Frankland. The radical theories of J. J. Berzelius—and more recently those of H. Kolbe and Frankland—were irrational, Odling believed, because they involved the real existence of hypothetical components; on the other hand, Gerhardt’s two-volume types (hydrogen, hydrogen chloride, water, and ammonia) merely used chemical analogies that were based upon facts which did not involve a commitment to unattainable absolute structures.
This positivism was prominent in Odling’s first paper to the Chemical Society in 1853.2 In it he extended Williamson’s use of the multiple water type (which classified compounds as substitution products in a double water molecule) and showed how all salts, however complex, could be reduced to “the types of one or more atoms of water.” (“Atom” was here being used in a conventionalist sense.) For example, the problematic phosphoric acids were construed as
while alum was a quadruple water type:
Superscript single, double, and triple vertical lines were introduced by Odling to indicate the equivalence, or “replaceable value,” of the element or group within the type formula compared with hydrogen. (He recognized, and allowed for, elements with variable equivalence, such as Fe’ in ferrous and Fe”’ in ferric salts; CO” in carbonic and CO’ in oxalic acid.) This useful notation was rapidly adopted by other chemists, and by the 1860’s the vertical lines were recognized as denoting the valence of particular atoms. Odling also introduced “mixed types” for molecules like sodium thiosulfate;
Such types were later used extensively by Kekulé.
In an important lecture on hydrocarbons in 1853, Odling extended these ideas and argued, against the radical school, that in hydrogen compounds, such as the hydrocarbons, there were as many potential radicals as there were parts of hydrogen.3 Thus
1. HCl
2. H · OH H2O
3. H · NH2 H2 · NH H3N
4. H · CH3 H2 · CH2 H3 · CH H4C methane
The methane example was made famous by Kekulé in 1857 as the “marsh gas type.” But unlike Kekulé, who possessed an offprint of the lecture, Odling failed to extend the type to several carbon compounds and thus failed to exploit the unifying possibilities implicit in his own notation, CivH4: the quadrivalence of carbon. Here the historical problem of Odling’s precise influence on Kekulé, as opposed to Gerhardt’s, is particularly puzzling.
Odling was one of the secretaries at the international conference on a rational system of combining or atomic weights held at Karlsruhe in 1860. Between 1853 and 1863 he was an enthusiastic propagandist for Gerhardt’s partial revision of atomic weights,4 and although he did not immediately see the need for Cannizzaro’s more sweeping revision, he accepted and publicized them beginning in 1864. Like Laurent, Odling had a passion for learned, and often impracticable, neologisms. In 1864 he introduced the terms “monad,” “dyad,” and “tetrad” for variable units of valence, and “artiads” and “perissads” for elements with even and odd valences, respectively. The terms were used widely in British textbooks and examinations until about 1900.
Odling’s interest in classification inevitably led him to examine the natural relationships between chemical elements and to publish several prescient schemes between 1857 and 1865. He was perhaps unique among Mendeleev’s many predecessors in placing more emphasis on the physical and chemical analogies between elements and their compounds, rather than indulging in numerical speculations about the atomic weights of the elements.
NOTES
1. His lecture on chemical affinity was reported extensively in Maidstone and South Eastern Gazette (June 1844), quoted in entirety by Freeman, pp. 190–202.
2. “On the Constitution of Acids and Salts as Substitution Products Formed on the Water Type,” in Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, 7 (1855), 1–21 (read 7 Nov. 1853 and probably extensively revised).
3. “On the Constitution of the Hydrocarbons,” in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 2 (1854–1858), 63–66 (read 16 Mar. 1855).
4. “On the Atomic Weights of Oxygen and Water” in Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, 11 (1859). 107–129; and “On the Molecule of Water,” in Chemical News, 8 (1863), 147–152.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Original Works. An unpublished bibliography of 150 publications is given by P. J. Freeman in “The Life and Times of William Odling (1829–1921), Waynflete Professor of Chemistry, 1872–1912” (B.Sc. thesis, Oxford, 1963). This supplements the published bibliography by John L. Thornton and Anna Wiles, “William Odling, 1829–1921,” in Annals of Science, 12 (1956), 288–295. To their lists, the following significant items should be added: “On the Basis of Chemical Notation.” in Nature, I (1869–1870), 600–602; “On the Unit Weight and Mode of Constitution of Compounds,” in Chemical News, 45 (1882), 63–65; and “The Whole Duty of a Chemist,” in Nature, 33 (1885–1886), 99, a reply to an editorial attack (ibid., 73–77) on Odling’s presidential address to the Royal Institute of Chemistry.
Odling’s textbooks, which are easily confused, are A Course of Practical Chemistry, Arranged for the Use of Medical Students(London, 1854; 2nd ed., 2 pts., 1863–1865; 3rd ed., 1865 [sic], trans, into Russian by R. Savtschenkoff [St. Petersburg, 1867] and read by Mendeleev; 4th ed., 1869; 5th ed., 1876, trans, into French by A. Naquet {1876]); A Manual of Chemistry, Descriptive and Theoretical, pt. I (London, 1861)—pt. II never appeared, but see MSS—trans, into Russian (St. Petersburg, 1863), German (Erlangen, 1865), and French (Paris, 1868)—for the O3 formula for ozone, see 1861 ed., pp. 93–94; Tables of Chemical Formulae (London, 1864), 8 leaves, the first list of Cannizzaro’s atomic weights in English; Lectures on Animal Chemistry, Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians (London, 1866), also trans, into Russian (St. Petersburg, 1867); A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical Changes of Carbon, W. Crookes, ed. (London, 1869), also trans, into French (Paris, 1870); Outlines of Chemistry, or Brief Notes of Chemical Facts (London, 1870 [published Nov. 1869]), for the influential bleaching powder formula, sec p. 24; and Science Primers for the People, no. 2, Chemistry (London, 1883).
Odling translated Auguste Laurent, Chemical Method, Notation, Classification and Nomenclature (London, 1855; some copies released in 1854). Odling’s final book was the extraordinary The Technic of Versification: Notes and Illustrations (Oxford-London, 1916), which Marsh (below) aptly described as “a kind of type theory of verse with a symbolic notation almost chemical.”
The principal archival sources are, in London: Chemical Society (B Club and Roscoe papers, photographs), Imperial College Archives, Royal Institute of Chemistry (several MSS, including drafts of pt. II of the Manual), Royal Institution, Royal Society (referee reports); at Harpenden: Rothamsted Experimental Station (J. H. Gilbert papers); at Oxford: Muséum of History of Science (Rev. F. J. J. Smith papers).
II. Secondary Literature. There are two good obituaries: J. E. Marsh, in Journal of the Chemical Society, 119 (1921), 553–564, with portrait; and H. B. D.[ixon], in Proceedings of the Royal Society,100A (1922), i-vii, with portrait. An Oxford student’s caricature of Odling lecturing is reproduced in R. T. Gunther, Early Science at Oxford, XI (Oxford, 1937), 293. To Freeman, and Thornton and Wiles (above), add K. R. Webb, “William Odling, Third President 1883–88, in Journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, 81 (1957), 728–733; and J. R. Brown and J. L. Thornton, “William Odling as Medical Officer of Health at Lambeth;’ in Medical Officer, 102 (1959), 77–78.
No detailed study of Odling’s influence on theoretical chemistry in the 1850’s and 1860’s has yet been made. For some indications see, on the problem of Odling’s influence on Kekulé, R. Anschütz, August Kekulé, I (Berlin, 1929), passim: on Odling’s contribution to valence, C. A. Russell, History of Valency (Leicester, 1970), passim; on Odling’s attitude toward Brodie and atomism, W. H. Brock, The Atomic Debates (Leicester, 1967), passim, which includes four letters; on Odling and the periodic law, J. W. van Spronsen, “William Odling wegbereider en ontdekker van het periodiek systeem der elementen 1864–1964,” in Chemisch Weekblad, 60 (1964), 683–686; and his Periodic System of Chemical Elements (Amsterdam-London-New York, 1969), 87–90, 112–116, 349–350; and, for general orientation, J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry,IV (London, 1964), passim. Finally, for a glimpse of Odling the administrator, see R. B. Pilcher, The Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland. History of the Institute, 1877–1914 (London, 1914), passim.
W. H. Brock