Abstract
AMONG chemists the name of Francis Jones is always associated—almost identified—with boron hydride. When Humphry Davy in 1809 heated the amorphous boron he had isolated with metallic potassium, and treated the grey mass with water, he found the hydrogen gas given off had a peculiar smell and took up more oxygen on explosion than did pure hydrogen. This observation was for seventy years the chief evidence of the existence of a hydride of boron, and after the researches of Wöhler and Deville, who doubted its existence, chemical text-books and dictionaries maintained a strict silence on the subject. The discovery of the spontaneously inflammable silicon hydride by Buff and Wohler in 1857 left boron the one exception to the rule that all the non-metallic elements combined with hydrogen, and the methods adopted by these chemists—as well as the experience he himself had gained in determining the composition of the hydride of antimony—led Francis Jones to plan his research on boron.
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D., H. Mr. Francis Jones. Nature 116, 720–721 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116720a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116720a0