William Hyde Wollaston

William Hyde Wollaston (1766 to 1828) was an English chemist and physicist, best known for discovering the elements palladium in 1802 and rhodium in 1804. Trained in medicine at Cambridge, he gave up his practice around 1800 and went into partnership with Smithson Tennant, where he worked out the first practical method of turning platinum ore into malleable metal and profited from it for about twenty years. His other work ranged widely. He observed dark lines in the solar spectrum in 1802, invented the camera lucida and the reflecting goniometer, designed the meniscus lens for cameras, and carried out early experiments on electricity. A Fellow of the Royal Society from 1793, he served as its president in 1820, and the mineral wollastonite is named for him.