10 Facts About Walter Weldon

Walter Weldon FRS FRSE was a 19th-century English industrial chemist and journalist.

Walter Weldon was born in Loughborough on 31 October 1832, the son of Reuben Weldon and his wife, Esther Fowke.

In 1854 he began work as a journalist in London with The Dial, and in 1860 he started a monthly magazine, Walter Weldon's Register of Facts and Occurrences relating to Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, which was later discontinued.

Walter Weldon's Ladies' Journal supplied dressmaking patterns, and was a blueprint for subsequent 'home weeklies'.

Walter Weldon's proposers were Alexander Crum Brown, Sir James Dewar, John Hutton Balfour and Sir Andrew Douglas Maclagan.

Walter Weldon was interested in parapsychology, and was a spiritualist and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Walter Weldon died at Rede Hall near Burstow in Surrey on 5 November 1914.

Walter Weldon was a successful chemist and developed the Walter Weldon process to produce chlorine by boiling hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide.

MnO2 was expensive, and Walter Weldon created a process for its recycling by treating the manganese chloride produced with milk of lime and blowing air through the mixture to form a precipitate known as Walter Weldon mud which was used to generate more chlorine.

Walter Weldon continued to work at the production of chlorine in connection with the processes of creating various sodium salts and became a leading authority on the subject.