Daniel Nitrogen Rutherford

Photo credit : www.wikipedia.org & www.slideshare.com
Memory tags: On coming across this Rutherford!

It is unlikely you would connect November 3rd and Daniel Rutherford. Overshadowed in name and deed by Ernst Rutherford( not a relation), Daniel Rutherford is far less famous till we look for the history of Nitrogen discovery.

This Rutherford-3rd November, 1749 marks his birth anniversary- was a doctor in Edinburgh between 1775-86 and then became a professor of Medicine and Botany at Edinburgh University and then was keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh from 1786 to 1819. He went on to become a member of the Royal household in Scotland in 1786. After five years he would go back to his original calling by becoming the physician at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In our modern world fragmented by specialization, it does appear rather improbable that a person with his curriculum vitae would also be the chemist of repute to whom the discovery of nitrogen is credited.

Well, what has not been mentioned in his CV is that he was student of Joseph Black who was professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, with the discovery of carbon dioxide and latent heat to his credit. Black was unable to ascertain the qualities of residual air after removal of carbon dioxide. Rutherford confirmed through his experiments that this gas did not support combustion or life and therefore this component was named” noxious air”.

Famous contemporary chemists like Scheele, Cavendish, Priestly and others about the same time studied this component of air and called it “dephlogisticated “ in keeping with the phlogiston theory of air prevailing at that time. The English word Nitrogen(1794) entered the English language from the French” nitrogene” coined in 1790 by the French chemist Jean Antoine Chaptal. Another often missed biographical data is the fact that Daniel Rutherford was the uncle of Sir Walter Scott who gave us famous titles like Ivan hoe, Rob Roy and the Lady of the Lake besides being a well-known lawyer.

Daniel Rutherford lived and worked during the period of Scottish Enlightenment when Scotland had four universities against just two in England and was centre for education and intellectual pursuits. Joseph Black along with David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair and James Hutton are some of the names associated with this time. Central to the the Scottish Enlightenment were accomplishments in science and medicine.

During Rutherford’s lifetime between 1786 and 1771, the Enclyclopedia Britannica was first published in three volumes with 2659 pages and 160 engravings, and quickly became a standard refrence in the English speaking world.Nothing more vividly illustrates the continuity of this time in which Daniel Rutherford worked than the fact that this encyclopedia continues on the world wide net even in the 21st century.

You ask what took me back to this old story? A packet of potato chips that had been kept crisp thanks to nitrogen. It is the same nitrogen, making upn 70% of our atmosphere that keeps us safe from burning up and is part of DNA, proteins and fertilizers, just to name a few life sustaining derivatives.

Main resources:

1. Wikipedia
2. Encyclopedia Britannica
3. www.humantouchofchemistry.com
4. daniel-rutherford.html
5. www.worldofchemicals.com