William Higgins (chemist)

William Higgins was an Irish chemist, born in 1763 at Collooney, County Sligo, into a well-known medical family, who died at Grafton Street, Dublin, in June 1825. He was sent as a boy to London to live with his uncle Bryan Higgins, also an eminent chemist, helped with the experiments in his uncle's work on acetous acid, toured English mineral sites and chemical makers in 1785, and entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1788 without finishing his degree. His Comparative View of Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Theories, issued in two editions, described reactions between ultimate particles with diagrams of their affinity forces and is credited with laying out much of Dalton's atomic theory some nineteen years earlier. From 1792 he worked in Dublin, first as chemist at Apothecaries Hall and then as professor of chemistry to the Royal Dublin Society, and from 1810 Humphry Davy promoted his claim to the atomic theory against that of John Dalton. His family resources and government-supported posts made him very wealthy.