Wollaston, WILLIAM HYDE, 'one of the ablest and most renowned of English chemists and natural philosophers,' was born at East Dereham, Norfolk, 6th August 1766. He was the second son of the seventeen children of the Rev. Francis Wollaston (1731-1815), who was the grandson of the preceding, rector of Chisellhurst, and an ardent astronomer. He went up to Caius College, Cambridge; took his M.B. in 1787, his M.D. in 1793; and gained a fellowship. Starting practice as a physician in Bury St Edmunds in 1789, he soon removed to London; but being beaten in a competition for the post of physician to St George's Hospital in 1800, he vowed 'never more to write a prescription, were it for his own father,' but to devote himself wholly to scientific research. This resolve (which by some is ascribed to an accession of fortune) proved ultimately most beneficial, leading him rapidly to fame and wealth; for, unlike many eminent investigators of nature's laws and phenomena, Wollaston combined 'the genius of the philosopher with the skill of the artist,' and succeeded in making industrial applications of several of his important discoveries. His researches were prosecuted over a wide field, but were pre-eminently fruitful in the sciences of chemistry and optics. To the facts of the former science he added the discovery of new compounds connected with the production of gouty and urinary concretions, such as phosphate of lime, ammonio-magnesian phosphate (a mixture of these two forming the 'fusible' calculus), oxalate of lime, and cystic oxide; also the discovery in the ore of platinum of two new metals, palladium (1804) and rhodium (1805). By his ingenious method of rendering platinum malleable he made £30,000; and some other practical discoveries were also highly lucrative. His contributions to optics were the reflecting Goniometer (q.v.), the Camera Lucida (q.v.), the discovery of the dark lines in the solar Spectrum (q.v.), and of the invisible rays beyond the violet, and an immensity of valuable observations on single and double refraction. He did much to establish the theory of definite proportions, and was the first to demonstrate the identity of galvanism and common electricity, to account for the difference in the phenomena of each, &c. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society (1793), its second secretary (1806), and a fellow of the Astronomical Society (1828). On 22d December of that last year, in which too he was awarded a royal medal, he died in London of a tumour on the brain, having just before worked out a sum to show that though speechless he was still conscious. He was a reserved and austere student, of whom yet we get pleasant glimpses in Lockhart's Scott and in Miss Edgeworth's Letters, and who on occasion was capable of splendid generosity.
See his thirty-nine memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions for 1809-29, and a sketch of his life in George Wilson's Religio Chemici (1862).