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Elizabeth Fulhame

By: Jackie Corrales

Family & Upbringing

Family & Upbringing

  • There is not much detail known about Fulhame's personal life
  • Elizabeth Fulhame was believed to be Scottish
  • She was married to Thomas Fulhame, an Irish born physician who attended The University of Edenburg and studied puerperal fever
  • 1750-1820

Educational Background

Educational Background

  • Information about her education is very limited
  • Her work shows her to be a skilled chemist, however she is believed to be self-taught
  • She was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society in 1810 when her book was published in the U.S.

Work & Contributions

Work & Contributions

  • She wrote a single scientific work in 1794: "An Essay on Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting"
  • The book contains Painstaking detail on experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions, and the conclusions she draws regarding Phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogisitians
  • Contains a large number of meticulously recorded experiments she carried out between 1780 and 1794 in her quest to make "Cloths of gold, silver, and other metals by chemical processes

Work and Contributions Cont.

Work & Contributions Cont.

  • Invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction
  • She was following a well-established alchemical tradition, also practiced by well-known scientists such as Robert Boyle and Issac Newton
  • Even though, with the scientific knowledge we have today, we may dismiss these attempts as pseudoscience, her experiments were perfectly valid explorations of the natural and material world
  • The experiments described in the book are worthy of any modern laboratory notebook
  • she shows she has read works of scientists of her day
  • She is not afraid to disagree with some of the eminent men of her time

Admiration of Work

Admiration of work

  • Her work was cited and admired by eminent chemists of her day:
  • Including professor Thomas Thomson, a British chemist
  • A French journal, Annales de Chime, which contained a long and favorable review by a doctor and chemist in Geneva
  • When her work was republished in the U.S., the editor praised her and called her ingenious and described her experiments as "numerous and well-conducted" and said she had "successfully opposed the opinions of some of our fathers in science."
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