Thomas Thomson (chemist)

Thomas Thomson was a Scottish chemist and mineralogist, born in Crieff in Perthshire in 1773 and dying at Kilmun in Argyllshire in 1852, whose writings contributed to the early spread of Dalton's atomic theory. He studied at the University of St Andrews and took his medical doctorate at Edinburgh in 1799, where his tutor Joseph Black inspired his turn to chemistry. His System of Chemistry of 1802 grew from his articles for the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, one of which contained the first use of letters as chemical symbols, and in 1817 he gave silicon its present name. He invented Allan's saccharometer, founded the Wernerian Natural History Society of Edinburgh in 1808 and the journal Annals of Philosophy in 1813, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1811. From 1817 he taught at the University of Glasgow, as Regius Professor of Chemistry until 1841, and the zeolite mineral thomsonite is named after him.