1. Friedrich Christian Accum or Frederick Accum was a German chemist, whose most important achievements included advances in the field of gas lighting, efforts to keep processed foods free from dangerous additives, and the promotion of interest in the science of chemistry to the general populace.
Friedrich Accum's business manufactured and sold a variety of chemicals and laboratory equipment.
Friedrich Accum was charged with founding the first gasworks in London to supply gas lighting to both private and public areas.
Friedrich Accum was instrumental in the conception and design of this extremely successful gasworks.
In 1820, Friedrich Accum published A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, in which he denounced the use of chemical additives to food.
Friedrich Accum was the first person to tackle the subject and to reach a wide audience through his activities.
Friedrich Accum left England after a lawsuit was brought against him.
Friedrich Accum lived out the rest of his life as a teacher at an industrial institution in Berlin.
Friedrich Accum's father was from Vlotho, and had been in an infantry regiment in the service of Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe.
In 1755, Friedrich Accum's father converted from Judaism to Protestant Christianity.
At the time of his conversion baptism, the senior Friedrich Accum changed his name from Markus Herz to Christian Friedrich Accum.
Friedrich Accum attended the Buckeburg Gymnasium Adolfinum and additionally received private tutelage in the subjects of French and English.
Friedrich Accum became acquainted with the surgeon Anthony Carlisle and the London chemist William Nicholson.
For many years, Friedrich Accum's establishment was the only significant institution in England that provided lectures on the theory of chemistry as well as training in laboratory practice.
Friedrich Accum developed portable laboratory kits, intended for farmers, for the analysis of soils and stones.
In March 1801, Frederick Friedrich Accum was offered a position at the Royal Institution in Ablemarle Street, a research institute founded two years earlier by Count Rumford.
Friedrich Accum held his first lecture on chemistry and mineralogy in a small room in his house on Old Compton Street.
Friedrich Accum's audience grew so rapidly that he soon had to rent the Medical Theatre on Cork Street.
An advertisement in The Times on 6 January 1809 indicates that Friedrich Accum offered a course on mineralogy and the chemical analysis of metals every Wednesday evening.
Friedrich Accum's increasing interest in mineralogy at this time is apparent from the titles of two books he authored between 1803 and 1809.
Friedrich Accum was among the first chemists in England to undertake experiments to isolate iodine.
In two articles published in Tilloch's Philosophical Journal in January and February 1814, Friedrich Accum described the iodine content of different kinds of seaweed and gave a detailed account of a process for iodine production.
Friedrich Accum shared this observation with Robert Boyle in a letter written in the 17th century.
In 1809, Friedrich Accum was asked to appear before a Parliamentary committee that was considering granting a charter for a gaslight company Winsor had been promoting.
Friedrich Accum oversaw the construction of a gas plant on Curtain Road, which was the first such plant in the history of gaslight.
In 1815, Friedrich Accum published "Description of the Process of Manufacturing Coal-Gas".
Friedrich Accum, who by this point was a leading proponent of gaslight in addition to his work as a chemist, strongly refuted these criticisms in his writings.
From early on in its conception, Friedrich Accum had been concerned with the byproducts of coal gas production, which included tar and sulphur compounds.
In 1820, Friedrich Accum began demanding legal measures to prevent the discharge of these byproducts into the sewage systems and rivers.
In 1820 Friedrich Accum began the public struggle against harmful food additives with his book entitled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons.
Friedrich Accum was the first to publicly proclaim the hazards of this practice and to reach a wide audience with his concerns.
Friedrich Accum alludes to his moral stance on food adulterations as he claims that:.
Friedrich Accum explained to his readers that there was a high lead content in Spanish olive oil, caused by the lead containers used to clear the oil, and recommended using oil from other countries such as France and Italy, where this was not practiced.
Friedrich Accum warned against bright green sweets sold by itinerant merchants in the streets of London as the colour was produced with "sapgreen", a colorant with high copper content.
Friedrich Accum wanted to make every test repeatable in the simplest possible way by a non-expert.
The second characteristic was that Friedrich Accum did not limit his campaign to simply exposing problems.
Friedrich Accum was well aware before the publication of his book that mentioning specific names from London's business world would provoke a resistance and a possibly a severe reaction.
The Magistrate after hearing the whole of the Case observed that however valuable the books might be from which the leaves found in Mr Friedrich Accum's house had been taken, yet the leaves separated from them were only waste paper.
Immediately upon his arrival in Germany, Friedrich Accum went to the town of Althaldensleben.
Friedrich Accum remained only a short time in Althaldensleben as he soon got a professorship at the Gewerbeinstitut and the Bauakademie in Berlin.
Friedrich Accum's teaching in the areas of physics, chemistry, and mineralogy, were collected in the two volume work, Physische und chemische Beschaffenheit der Baumaterialien, deren Wahl, Verhalten und zweckmassige Anwendung, published in Berlin in 1826.
Friedrich Accum's illness took a serious turn for the worse in June 1838, and he rapidly deteriorated.
The first biographical sketch of Friedrich Accum's life was written by the American agricultural chemist and historian of science Charles Albert Browne, Jr.
Friedrich Accum studied the life and works of Accum closely for ten years, which he was able to complement with information from civil and ecclesiastical sources in Buckeburg.
Friedrich Accum was particularly concerned with bringing new information to light about the judicial process of 1821.
Lawson Cockroft of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London observed that Friedrich Accum was one of those chemists who, despite significant achievements in his lifetime, was by and large forgotten today.
Probably the best known pictorial representation of Friedrich Accum was an engraving by James Thomson made in July 1820 for the English journal European Magazine.