Elizabeth Fulhame

Elizabeth Fulhame (active in 1794) was an early British chemist who proposed the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction, and has been described as the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry. Her only publication, An Essay on Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, appeared in 1794 and described in detail her experiments on the reduction of metal salts, in solution, dry or in ether or alcohol, using hydrogen gas, phosphorus and other agents, with the aim of making cloths of gold and silver by chemical processes. She argued against both the phlogistic and the antiphlogistic hypotheses. The book was translated into German in 1798 and published in the United States in 1810, the year she was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society. She published as Mrs Fulhame, being married to the Irish-born physician Thomas Fulhame.