Alexander Crum Brown

1838 - 1922

Organic chemist, born in Edinburgh. Crum Brown studied in London and Leipzig before returning to the University of Edinburgh in 1863. He held the Chair of Chemistry, which now bears his name, until his death. He discovered the carbon double bond in ethylene (1864), which was to have important implications for the modern plastics industry. He devised the system of representing chemical compounds in diagrammatic form, with connecting lines representing bonds. He made significant contributions to pharmacology, but also worked in physiology, phonetics, mathematics and crystallography.

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