Alexander Crum Brown

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Extract from Alexander Crum Brown's influential paper.

Alexander Crum Brown FRS (26 March 1838 - 28 October 1922) was a Scottish organic chemist.

Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the Royal High School, and in London and Leipzig, before returning to take a teaching post at the University of Edinburgh in 1863. In 1865 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University in 1869, holding the Chair until his retirement in 1908. The Chair of Chemistry at the university still bears his name today.

Crum Brown's pioneering work was in the development of a system of representing chemical compounds in diagrammatic form. In 1864 he began to draw pictures of molecules, in which he enclosed the symbols for atoms in circles, and used broken lines to connect the atoms together in a way that satisfied each atom's valence. The results of his influential work were published in The Journal of the Chemical Society of London in 1865.

He discovered the carbon double bond in ethylene, which was to have important implications for the modern plastics industry. He also made significant contributions to pharmacology, and worked in the fields of physiology, phonetics, mathematics and crystallography.

Crum Brown died in 1922.