Regency Personalities Series-Daniel Rutherford

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Daniel Rutherford
3 November 1749 – 15 December 1819

Daniel Rutherford

A Scottish physician, chemist and botanist who is most famous for the isolation of nitrogen in 1772.

Rutherford was the uncle of the novelist Sir Walter Scott.

The son of Professor John Rutherford and Anne Mackay, Daniel Rutherford was born in Edinburgh on 3 November 1749. He left home at the age of 16 to go to college. He was educated at Mundell’s School and Edinburgh University.

When Joseph Black was studying the properties of carbon dioxide, he found that a candle would not burn in it.

Black turned this problem over to Rutherford. Rutherford kept a mouse in a space with a confined quality of air until it died. (DWW-Obviously Science trumped the SPCA at the time, if there even was an Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)

Then, he burned a candle in the remaining air until it went out. Afterwards, he burned phosphorus in that, until it would not burn. Then the air was passed through a carbon dioxide absorbing solution. The remaining oxygen:
                “did not support combustion, and a mouse could not live in it.”

Rutherford called the gas (which we now know would have consisted primarily of nitrogen) “noxious air” or “phlogisticated air”. (DWW-I would use phlogisticated-it sounds very archaic.) Rutherford reported the experiment in 1772. He and Black were convinced of the validity of the phlogiston theory, so they explained their results in terms of it.

He was a professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh and keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

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