Abstract
ON September 29 occurs the bicentenary of the birth of James Keir, an able chemist and the friend of Erasmus Darwin, Boulton, Watt, Priestley and Davy. The youngest of a family of eighteen and born in Stirlingshire, after attending the High School and University of Edinburgh he entered the Army and afterwards served for several years in the West Indies. Resigning his commission in 1768, he settled in the Midlands, became connected with various industrial enterprises and devoted himself to chemistry and geology. He was in turn a glass manufacturer at Stourbridge, an assistant to Boulton and Watt at Soho and the founder, with Alexander Blair, of a soap and alkali works. With Blair, too, in 1794 he opened the Tividale Colliery. In 1776 he translated Macquer's “Dictionary of Chemistry” and in 1777 published a treatise on elastic fluids or gases. He also contributed chemical papers to the Royal Society, and in 1785 was elected a fellow. A chemical dictionary of his own, of which he published the first part in 1789, he discontinued on his becoming convinced of the weakness of the phlogiston theory. For many years he lived at West Bromwich, where he died October 11, 1820, at the age of eighty-five years.
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Bicentenary of James Keir, F.R.S.. Nature 136, 506–507 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136506e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136506e0