On the discovery of the metal thallium / by William Crookes, F.R.S.

  • Crookes, William, 1832-1919.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the discovery of the metal thallium / by William Crookes, F.R.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    13/25 (page 7)
    16th of May, 1862, when M. Lamy made known the new metal. Here, again, the publication of this fact by myself on the 1st of May, 1862, is ignored, and M. Dumas remarks, No one could dispute that M. Lamy was the first to isolate thallium, and so to demonstrate that it is a true metal, and not a metalloid, as supposed by Mr. Crookes, who never obtained it uncombined and pure. But notwithstanding these facts, M. Lamy has since stated that the first time I described thallium as a metal was in my communication to the Royal Society in June; and still ignoring my publication of that fact on the ] st of May, he repeats the statement that I was ignorant of this fact until June, and then he declares it was communicated to me by himself. It may be that, when M. Lamy read his paper to the Societe Imperiale at Lille on the 16th of May, he was ignorant that I regarded thallium as a metal; but he must have been aware of this when he read his paper to the Academy in June, after having visited the Exhibition and seen the labels attached to my specimens, for Mr. Quin took the trouble to explain them to him. In proof of this, I may also refer to the account M. Lamy gives of his motive for coming to London in June 1862, viz., to ascertain for himself what results I had obtained, before announcing to the Academy a discovery he was no longer certain of having made. Why this doubt, I may ask ? He says he had heard my thallium was in the Exhibition. M. Lamy has not claimed the discovery of thallium itself; he only claims to have been the first to isolate it, and to ascertain it to be a metal. This is the discovery as to which he was in doubt whether he had not been anticipated; and his visit to the Exhibition gave him ample opportunity for learning that he had been antici- pated both in the discovery and in the publication of it. And yet, with the full knowledge of what he saw there written, he now has the hardihood to assert that I was ignorant of the metallic nature of thallium until he told me. But M. Lamy will not recognize the evidence which he saw in the Exhibition, that I regarded thallium as a metal, and had so described it since the 1st of May, 1862. He still maintains that, before he showed his piece of thallium in June, no one in England had seen thallium; that the substance I exhibited was not thallium, and could not be thallium, but only a black powder to which I gave that name. He says, no one knew it was a metal; that chemists even doubted its existence as an elementary substance; that I first learnt from him that it was a metal, and that having done so I hastened to communicate to the Royal Society a statement of nearly all the properties of thallium he had described to me.