GEORGE BEILBY
Sir George Thomas Beilby FRS (1850-1924)
Scottish
industrial chemist, national adviser and benefactor, George Beilby had a vital
influence on industrial and scientific progress, but is now too little known.
A descendant of a notable Tyneside glassmaking family,
he was born in Edinburgh in 1850 to a doctor and an artist. One of his grandparents had been President of
the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, another a Baptist minister, and his uncle Julius was a papermaker and
Edinburgh director of the Clydesdale
Bank. George was
educated in Edinburgh at the Academy and University, and in 1869 began
working in the oil shale industry nearby, where Edinburgh obstetrician Sir James Young Simpson had invested
to develop the Oakbank Company along scientific principles.
from David Kerr’s Shale Oil Scotland (2nd Ed)
William Young
Beilby soon began a productive technical collaboration
with Selkirk-born technologist William Young, ten years his
senior. Working together from 1872, they were able to increase the yield of
oil, ammonia and other useful materials from the shale by retorting and
fractional distillation improvements, and the Young and Beilby patent retort of
1882 was the result. Their methods
dominated the oil shale industry for decades to come. Beilby continued to support William Young’s
later work on oil and gasworks efficiency.
He went on himself to develop and patent a process for the bulk
synthesis of potassium cyanide for use in the gold-extraction industry, by
passing ammonia over a heated mixture of charcoal and potassium carbonate. This process helped meet the increased demand
for cyanide for use in extracting gold from low-grade ores, a technique newly
developed by a young Govan analytical chemist John Stewart MacArthur and
two Govan doctors, William and Robert Wardrop Forrest.
John Stewart MacArthur
Beilby's close association from 1892 with the
Glasgow-based Cassel Cyanide Company helped to make him a fortune in this
field. Then, with a later sodium cyanide
process to his credit, Beilby became a director of the Castner-Kellner Company
at Runcorn and he developed their new Tyneside facilities at Wallsend. Also involved in the development of the
aluminium industry in Britain, Beilby was instrumental in founding the Scottish
branch of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI). He was the Society's President
in 1899. His work and contacts drew him increasingly to the centre of British
scientific and industrial progress, which he sought to advance strategically in
the practical application of atomic chemistry, metallurgy, and fuel economy.
George had married Emma Clarke Newnham a daughter of
the Baptist manse at Dublin Street, Edinburgh in 1877 and, moving from a first house near the
Oakbank oilworks at The Birches, East Calder, the couple settled into a large
villa at St Kitts, Colinton where their children Hubert and Winifred grew
up. Later the family moved to Glasgow, to University Gardens, Kelvingrove, not far from
the Cassel Cyanide Company plant at Maryhill.
From an imposing corner house overlooking the newly relocated Glasgow University, Beilby was to exercise influence on British
technology and industry.
Frederick Soddy
Beilby had no official standing at Glasgow University but he nevertheless worked closely with fellow
chemist Sir William Ramsay in promoting the teaching of scientific and
technical subjects there --and at the Glasgow Technical College. He took
special interest in emerging work on the borders of physics and chemistry, and
the researches in radioactivity planned by the young New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the young English
chemist Frederick Soddy, both at that time in posts at McGill University, Montreal. Rutherford
hoped to come to Scotland through a professorship at Edinburgh in 1901.
Soddy, who had already impressed Ramsay, visited Glasgow that year and through his school friend H.C.H.
Carpenter met Beilby there at the British Association meeting in
September. After successfully completing
his Montreal research on transmutation with Rutherford, Soddy spent some time working with Ramsay at
University College London. He and Beilby
were together again at the 1903 British Association meeting, where they were
shown the research laboratories developed by Arthur Schuster FRS in the Physics
Department at Manchester, at that time among the largest in the world -Rutherford
was brought in to head them when Schuster retired. Soddy was duly found a post to form and lead
a small research team in physical chemistry and radioactivity in Glasgow University. He came to live in the Beilby household at 11 University Gardens in 1904, where he began the most productive period of
his life. Soddy was in no doubt about
the power these researches might unleash. Lecturing the Royal Engineers in
1904, he said ''The man who put his hand on the lever by which a
parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy
would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose.'' Soddy (later Nobel Laureate for Chemistry) was
engaged to Beilby’s daughter Winifred when she came of age in 1906. Winifred Beilby was on the threshold of her
career as a recognised researcher in radioactivity. They were married two years later in
1908.
Sophia Jex-Blake
George and Emma Beilby had enlightened interests in
women’s rights, mountain walking, the arts and medicine, and supported the work
of Sophia Jex-Blake and her Bruntsfield Hospital for women in Edinburgh, where a Beilby Ward was endowed. It was in the Beilbys’ Glasgow home at 11
University Gardens that a close friend of the family, Jex-Blake's biographer
and companion the medical novelist Margaret Todd, suggested that Soddy
use the word “isotope” to describe the atoms of a chemical element with the
same atomic number and position in the periodic table and near-identical
chemical behaviour but different atomic masses and physical properties. It was Beilby who gave Soddy and his team 50
kilograms of uranyl nitrate on which to begin research into what became known
as the disintegration theory. It was
Beilby who smoothed the way for Soddy to obtain supplies of the radioactive
material needed in Scotland for research and medical applications. Beilby’s
colleague in the Cassel patents, J. S. MacArthur (the benefactor of Balliol College) developed radium production first at Runcorn then at
Balloch on Loch
Lomond. And it was the Beilbys, husband and wife, who
in 1912 symbolically gave the money to repay Madame Curie for the radium
sample that Soddy and others had used to establish the international standard
for radioactivity.
Marie Curie in 1912
In February 1904, Beilby presented the centenary
lecture at the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow on advances in chemical
industry during the nineteenth century.
He chaired the chemical section of the British Association held in South
Africa in 1905 and in 1906 attended the International Congress of Applied
Chemistry in Rome, visiting Switzerland for a family mountain holiday along the
way. He was later to preside over the Institute of Chemistry (1909 -12) and the Institute of Metals (1915-18). He was Chairman of the Governors of the Royal Technical College in Glasgow from 1907. As
a metallurgist, Beilby postulated that a film forms on the surface of a metal
by plastic flow when a metal is polished. From his work in shale oil and
cyanide production, he had noted the destructive effect of ammonia on metals at
high temperatures. Researching the flow of solids, Beilby inferred that when a
solid is caused to flow, as in polishing, the crystalline surface is broken
down to a harder and denser layer. Although much criticized, this controversial
theory of what became known as the Beilby Layer explained the hardening of
metals under cold working and helped to stimulate further research.
Alexander Fleck
Alexander Fleck, a friendly and perceptive fourteen year old employed
in 1904 to keep Soddy’s radio-activity laboratory tidy at Glasgow University became a trusted member of the team. With Beilby and Soddy he used to go over to
the Cassel chemical works at Maryhill to help sort out practical
problems there. In due course after
technical classes he was encouraged to enrol and obtain a degree in
chemistry. The degree of trust was such
that in 1913 Fleck took over Soddy’s post as technical adviser to the West of
Scotland Radium Committee, and obtained a doctorate for his subsequent thesis
on Some chapters of the chemistry of the
radio-elements. In 1916 he left the University to become chief
chemist at Beilby’s Castner-Kellner plant in Wallsend. After Beilby’s death, the interests in Cassel
Cyanide and Castner-Kellner were amalgamated with partners in Brunner Mond and
a number of other firms to form Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926.
Fleck planned the amalgamation of the Wallsend and
Maryhill plants on a large new site at Billingham, and with an instinct for
practical issues and good industrial relations he rose through the company to
became head of ICI worldwide. He chaired
the committees set up following the Atomic Energy Establishment’s Windscale
accident in 1957. Presiding over the
British Association meeting in Glasgow in 1958, Fleck unveiled a plaque to
Soddy and, delighted to find his own name also there, exclaimed “It’s no
every man gets his name on a brass plate before he’s deid!”
George Beilby
But to return to Fleck’s mentor, George Beilby served
on the Admiralty Board of Inventions and Research, advising on matters relating
to the production and use of oil for the Navy.
His membership of the Royal Commission on Oil Fuel from 1912, and his
knowledge of Scottish techniques and investments in oil production at home and
abroad led indirectly to Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty taking a
major government shareholding in the Glasgow-based Burmah Oil Company’s
substantial Anglo-Persian interests in 1913. This, by bringing together all the
Scottish oil-shale businesses and refining expertise, was to form the basis for
the semi-nationalised company that became BP.
Pursuing his personal interest in new forms of oil
production and more efficient energy use, Beilby was appointed chairman of the
Fuel Research Board and director of its Fuel Research Station. This new research facility at East Greenwich was laid out under Beilby’s personal care, reflecting
his idea of what a centre of national research on the scientific utilization of
fuel should be. He held this position
for six years during and after the war, publishing the record of the centre’s
studies and experiments in Fuel Research reports issued annually by the
government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Beilby worked hard to survey of the properties of the
various types of coal and brown coal available in the British Isles with a view to their more scientific utilization. He
also explored techniques to make Britain self-sufficient in fuel oils, in view
of emerging wartime naval requirements that were soon to become pressing. The Royal Commission on Fuel and Engines for
the Navy, 1912-13, had reported that the way ahead lay in the development of a
new carbonising industry, founded on the distillation of coal at a temperature
well below that used in gas retorts and coke ovens. Beilby ensured that the scientific and
technical problems of this approach were solved so that an adequate supply of
oil fuel could be produced if the need had continued, but with low -
temperature distillation coke was the main product of the process and its
commercial disposal remained a problem.
One result of Beilby’s attempts to standardise town gas supplies
efficiently was the establishment of the "therm" as the basis for the
charging of town gas to consumers.
In these later
years Beilby lived mainly in Hampstead and towards the end of his life became
associated with University College, London. He was knighted in 1916 and died in Hampstead in 1924.
From his first days as an inventor, in each of the
processes he pioneered, Beilby had sought to make the most productive and
economical use of raw materials and fuel, and to minimise smoke and other
polluting wastes. He took a lively concern in the role of science and
technology in human welfare and progress. He was warmly interested in the arts.
He researched the properties and permanency of artists’ materials, and over
many years took painstaking pleasure in designing and hand-building extensive home
organs in the houses where he lived. After his death, the organ he had
constructed at 11 University Gardens was carefully dismantled and reinstalled in the hall
of Glasgow Royal Technical College, George Street at the expense of Emma Beilby by organ builders Hill
Norman & Beard, and it was inaugurated at a public concert of his favourite
music there in 1926.
HCH Carpenter
When the metallurgist H.C.H. Carpenter wrote George
Beilby’s obituary for the Royal Society in 1925, he ended with this tribute: “A
study of Beilby's life and work as a whole leaves a vivid impression of his
greatness. He was a successful manufacturer and an acute and patient scientific
investigator. Though he gave the
impression of alertness and quickness of thought, his mind really preferred to
work slowly and cautiously. It was
speculative, but always scientifically controlled. It was this quality which gave his scientific
work its peculiar value. He was also a
great public servant and citizen. He
possessed great nobility of character and endeared himself by his personal
qualities to his friends. He had in a
pre-eminent degree the quality of charm, and this was felt not merely by his
intimate friends but by those who met him, perhaps only a few times. He carried in his face a look of rare
high-mindedness and elevation. Probably
no-one will ever know the full extent of his generosity, for it was always
exercised in the quietest possible way, and it is doubtful whether anyone has
ever helped so many other investigators, whatever their age, or helped them in
a more perfect way.”
George Beilby family
tree
Beilby’s oil & gas colleague William Young
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