Harold Baily Dixon

Harold Baily Dixon, CBE, FCS, FRS (11 August 1852 – 18 September 1930) was a British chemist. Born in London, England, he was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford under Vernon Harcourt, graduating in 1875. He became a Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and by 1885 he was both the Millard Lecturer on Physics at Trinity College, Oxford and the Duke of Bedford's Lecturer on Chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford. On the opening of the first women's colleges in 1879, Dixon was instrumental in allowing women to attend physics lectures. Margaret Seward was a prominent beneficiary of Dixon's proposition. He served as Professor of Chemistry at Owen's College, Manchester from 1886 to 1922.

Dixon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886, and gave its Bakerian Lecture in 1893. He was a Fellow of the Chemical Society, serving as its President from 1909 to 1911. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1913: "On the ground of his eminence in physical chemistry, especially in connexion with explosions in gases." Dixon was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1918.

Dixon died in Lytham, Lancashire on 18 September 1930.

Sources

• Entry for Dixon in the Royal Society's Library and Archive catalogue's details of Fellows (accessed 27 April 2008)
• DIXON, Harold Baily, Biographical Database of the British Chemical Community, 1880–1970, from the Open University
• Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939: Laboratories, Learning, and College Life, Robert Fox and Graeme Gooday, ed.
• "Obituary Notices :Harold Baily Dixon". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 134 (825): 1932. i–xxvi. JSTOR 95888. 

External links

• Harold Bailey Dixon, photograph from the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Library (Dixon is at centre)
• The Chemical Society 1897 to 1944, includes a picture of Dixon, from the Royal Society of Chemistry