Record

RefNoEC/1908/07
Previous numbersCert XII, 264
LevelItem
TitleGowland, William: certificate of election to the Royal Society
CitationProfessor of Metallurgy in the Royal College of Science, London. Associate of the Royal School of Mines, in Mining and Metallurgy, 1870. Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries. Distinguished for his knowledge of the metallurgy of copper, in which he has devised and carried out many important improvements. As chemist, metallurgist and foreign head of the Imperial Japanese Mint (1872-1889), he inaugurated the standard silver and copper currency of Japan, and was responsible for the entire coinage of these currencies as well as that of gold. He introduced western metallurgical methods for the refining and smelting of copper, the refining of gold and silver, the manufacture of brass and gunmetal castings for Ordnance, and erected works and trained the men carrying them out. In recognition of his scientific services, HIM the Emperor conferred upon him the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun. He has made an extended research on the relations between the electrical resistance of copper containing arsenic and the amount of arsenic present , the results of which he applied to the control of the operations of copper refining on a large scale (not yet published). Also investigated the nature of Japanese copper, tin, lead, gold, silver and other alloys (Reports of the Japanese Mint, 1875 to 1889); 'The effects of Bismuth on Silver' (Journ Chem Soc, 1887); 'On Japanese Speise and the JapaneseMetallurgy of Gold and Silver' (Journ Chem Soc Ind, 1894 and 1896). Joint author with the late Sir W Roberts-Austen, of the sixth Report of the alloys Research Committee on the heat treatment of steel (Proc Inst Mech Eng, 1904). For some years has carried out several important investigations into prehistoric and early metallurgy of copper, iron, tin and lead, the copper alloys of the bronze age, the metallurgy of lead as practised by the Romans, Roman silver refining, &c (Archaeologia, 1899 1900, Proc Soc Antiq, 1897).
ProposersA Liversidge; William Crookes; R Meldola; H McLeod; William Ramsay; A H Church; James Dewar; T E Thorpe; E Divers; J E Stead; Arthur W Rucker; J W Judd; H C Sorby; Avebury; J Milne; W M F Petrie; H S Hele-Shaw; H G Seeley; J Perry; H T Brown
Extent1 sheet
AccessStatusOpen
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Gowland, William: certificate of election to the Royal Society

Fellows associated with this archive
CodePersonNameDates
NA8177Gowland; William (1842 - 1922)1842 - 1922
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