Augustus George Vernon Harcourt FRS (24 December 1834 – 23 August 1919) was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 chemist who spent his career at Oxford University. He was one of the first scientists to do quantitative work in the field of chemical kinetics

Chemical kinetics

Chemical kinetics, also known as reaction kinetics, is the study of rates of chemical processes. Chemical kinetics includes investigations of how different experimental conditions can influence the speed of a chemical reaction and yield information about the reaction's mechanism and transition...

. His uncle, William Vernon Harcourt

William Vernon Harcourt (scientist)

William Vernon Harcourt was founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.-Family:He was born at Sudbury, Derbyshire, a younger son of Edward Vernon-Harcourt, Archbishop of York and his wife Lady Anne Leveson-Gower, who was a daughter of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Marquess of...

 (1789 – 1871), founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Brief biography

According to Who's Who, Harcourt was born in London in 1824 to Admiral Fredrick E. Vernon Harcourt and his wife, Marcia Harcourt's mother was sister of the first Lord Tollemache

John Tollemache, 1st Baron Tollemache

John Jervis Tollemache, 1st Baron Tollemache , was a British Conservative Member of Parliament and a major landowner and estate manager in Cheshire.-Personal life and career:...

. Augustus Harcourt was educated at Harrow School

Harrow School

Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

 before enrolling at Oxford's Balliol College, where he took a degree in Natural Science in 1858, working with Henry Smith and Benjamin Brodie

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 2nd Baronet

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 2nd Baronet FRS was an English chemist.Brodie was the son of Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet, and his wife Anne , and was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford...

. A year later Harcourt became Lee's Reader in chemistry and took a position as a senior student at Christ Church

Christ Church, Oxford

Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...

, an Oxford college. Working with the mathematician William Esson

William Esson

William Esson was a British mathematician. He attended St John's College, Oxford, and then became a fellow of Merton College . In 1892, he became the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. He worked on problems in chemistry with Augustus George Vernon Harcourt.-References:...

 (1838 – 1916), Harcourt began a series of chemical investigations which lasted for over 40 years.

In 1872, Harcourt married Rachel Mary Bruce, daughter of the Home Secretary, Henry Bruce

Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare

Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare GCB, PC, FRS was a British Liberal Party politician, who served in government most notably as Home Secretary and as Lord President of the Council....

. The couple had two sons and eight daughters. Harcourt was contemporary with Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

, and is mentioned in Carroll's diaries.

Harcourt remained at Oxford until he retired in 1902, whereupon he moved to St. Clare, near Ryde on the Isle of Wight. He died there in 1919, and his wife followed in 1927.

Chemical kinetics

In a long partnership, Harcourt and William Esson studied the rates of chemical reactions. Among the processes they investigated was the acid-catalyzed iodine clock reaction

Iodine clock reaction

The iodine clock reaction is a classical chemical clock demonstration experiment to display chemical kinetics in action; it was discovered by Hans Heinrich Landolt in 1886. Two colorless solutions are mixed and at first there is no visible reaction...

 (iodide and hydrogen peroxide). Their work showed that the reaction's changing rate was proportional to the concentration of reactants present. This result was later formalized by Guldberg and Waage as the law of mass action. Harcourt and Esson also studied the reaction between oxalic acid and potassium permanganate.

Other scientific work

Harcourt's other activities included inventing a device to safely administer chloroform (an anesthesic), and the analysis and purification of coal gas

Coal gas

Coal gas is a flammable gaseous fuel made by the destructive distillation of coal containing a variety of calorific gases including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen...

, used for illumination. Harcourt also invented pentane-burning lamps that served as photometric standards.

Honours and activities

• 1863 - Fellow of the Royal Society
• 1865 – 1873 - Secretary of the Chemical Society
• 1895 - President of the Chemical Society

External links

• Biographical material from Christ Church (Oxford)
• Obituary from Journal of the Chemical Society, (1920), volume 117, 1626 – 1648