Edward Divers

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Edward Divers bigraphy, stories - Chemist

Edward Divers : biography

27 November 1837 – 8 April 1912

Edward Divers FRS (27 November 1837 – 8 April 1912) was a British experimental chemist who rose to prominence despite being visually impaired from young age. Between 1873 and 1899, Divers lived and worked in Japan and significantly contributed to the science and education of that country.

Life and work in Japan

On the recommendation of A. W. Williamson, in July 1873, Divers left for Japan. This country had then only begun to remodel, in particular by introducing Western sciences and institutions. Divers was invited to teach general and applied chemistry at the Imperial College of Engineering at Toranomon, Tokyo. He eventually became the Principal of the College in 1882. In 1886 the college was incorporated with the Tokyo University, where Divers held the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry until his return to England in 1899. During his first seven or eight years in Japan due to administrative and teaching duties, as well as numerous requests from the Department of Public Works to analyse samples of various minerals and noble metals. As a result, his first papers after leaving England were on Japanese minerals, and these were communicated to the meetings of the British Association held in York in 1881. One of these papers was on the occurrence of selenium and tellurium in Japanese sulfur obtained from lead-chamber deposits of the Osaka sulfuric acid work. Using this material he later discovered tellurium sulfoxide and developed a new method for the quantitative separation of tellurium from selenium. These and other papers on tellurium and selenium were published in the Journal of the Chemical Society during 1883–1885. There he published more than 20 other paper within a short period of 1884–1885, mostly on the chemistry of nitrogen and sulfur compounds.

Two years before coming to Japan, Divers reported an important paper on "The existence and Formation of Salts of Nitrous Oxide”, which he elaborated in Japan in 1884 to establish the composition of silver hyponitrite as (AgNO)x, against the formula Ag5N5O5 asserted by Berthelot and Ogier. In 1885 he discarded the work by Georg Ludwig Carius, according to which thionyl chloride formed by the action of phosphorus pentachloride on inorganic sulfites was regarded as a direct product of the reaction and which formed the only experimental evidence in favour of the symmetrical constitution of the sulfites. Divers demonstrated that thionyl chloride was instead produced by a secondary reaction between sulfur dioxide and phosphorus pentachloride. It was in the course of this work, on 24 November 1884, that Divers lost vision in his right eye as he was badly cut by pieces of glass resulting from the sudden bursting of the bottle with phosphorus oxychloride.

Chemistry of sulfonated nitrogen compounds was the subject of most attention for Divers while staying in Japan. In collaboration with Haga, he showed that the numerous complex acids belonging to this group of compounds are the products of the reaction between sulfurous and nitrous acids, the base being essential only in so far as it protects the products of the reaction against hydrolysis, and that, contrary to the statements of previous workers, normal sulfites and nitrites have no action on each other. Divers and Haga further showed that the primary product of the reaction between sulfurous and nitrous acids is always hydroxylaminedisulfonic acid and nothing else.

Divers was pre-eminently an experimental chemist and rarely occupied with the theoretical study of chemical questions. He greatly encouraged the spirit of experimental research among his pupils including Jokichi Takamine, who was the first to prepare pure adrenaline, and Masataka Ogawa who discovered nipponium. By advice of Divers, M. Chikashige of the Kyoto Imperial University studied the atomic weight of Japanese tellurium in 1896, in the hope that this tellurium, which contrary to the European tellurium is associated with sulfur and not with any heavy metal, might yield an atomic weight in conformity with the periodic law. No difference was observed, however.