Friedrich Accum

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Friedrich Accum bigraphy, stories - Chemist

Friedrich Accum : biography

March 29, 1769 – June 28, 1838

Friedrich Christian Accum or Frederick Accum (March 29, 1769 – June 28, 1838) was a German chemist, whose most important achievements included advances in the field of gas lighting, efforts to keep processed foods free from dangerous additives, and the promotion of interest in the science of chemistry to the general populace.Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ISBN 0-550-18022-2, page 5 From 1793 to 1821 Accum lived in London. Following an apprenticeship as an apothecary, he opened his own commercial laboratory enterprise. His business manufactured and sold a variety of chemicals and laboratory equipment. Accum, himself, gave fee based public lectures in practical chemistry and collaborated with research efforts at numerous other institutes of science

Intrigued by the work of Frederick Winsor, who had been championing the introduction of gas lighting in London, Accum too, became fascinated by this innovation. At the request of the Gas Light and Coke Company, he carried out many experiments in this novel field of inquiry. After a time of close working association with this company, he became a member of its board of directors in 1812. The company was charged with founding the first gasworks in London to supply gas lighting to both private and public areas. Accum was instrumental in the conception and design of this extremely successful gasworks.

The majority of Accum’s publications were written in English. They were executed in a style that made them quite accessible to the common man. Many scientific contributions were brought forth through his writings, which were influential in the popularization of chemistry during this era. In 1820, Accum published Treatise on Adulteration of Food, in which he denounced the use of chemical additives to food. This ground breaking work marked the beginning of an awareness of need for food safety oversight. Accum was the first person to tackle the subject and to reach a wide audience through his activities. His book, controversial at the time, found a wide audience and sold well. However, it threatened established practices within the food processing industry, earning him many enemies among the London food manufactures. Accum left England after a lawsuit was brought against him. He lived out the rest of his life as a teacher at an industrial institution in Berlin.

Bibliography and primary sources

The first biographical sketch of Friedrich Accum’s life was written by the American agricultural chemist and historian of science Charles Albert Browne, Jr. in 1925. He studied the life and works of Accum closely for ten years, which he was able to complement with information from civil and ecclesiastical sources in Bückeburg. His enthusiasm for the subject was so great that he traveled to Germany in July 1930 to meet with Hugo Otto Georg Hans Westphal (August 26, 1873 – September 15, 1934), a great-grandson of Accum’s. Brown’s last writing on the subject, which appeared in 1948 in Chymia, a journal for the history of chemistry, relied to a great extent on the information he gathered from Hugo Westphal. Three years later, R. J. Cole published an outline of Accum’s life based on English sources. He was particularly concerned with bringing new information to light about the judicial process of 1821. Like Browne, Cole also provided relatively little data about the last part of Accum’s life in Berlin. A modern presentation about Accum’s life and works that fills in the lacuna in the available biographies has not been written. Lawson Cockroft of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London observed that Friedrich Accum was one of those chemists who, despite significant achievements in his lifetime, was by and large forgotten today. "Fredrick Accum is representative of a chemist who is largely forgotten these days but nevertheless contributed to important changes in society […]".

Black and white photograph of an oil painting by Samuel Drummond, from London. Probably the best known pictorial representation of Accum was an engraving by James Thomson made in July 1820 for the English journal European Magazine. It shows Accum sitting at a table close to a gas lamp. Thomson’s engraving was probably based on an oil painting by the London portrait painter Samuel Drummond (1765–1844), who had shown Accum in a similar pose in a painting produced a few years prior to this. In addition, Accum’s brother-in-law, the artist Wilhelm Strack, painted an oil portrait that shows Accum as a young man.