Adair Crawford

Adair Crawford FRS FRSE (1748 – 29 July 1795), a chemist and physician, was a pioneer in the development of calorimetric methods for measuring the specific heat capacity of substances and the heat of chemical reactions. In his influential 1779 book "Experiments and Observations on Animal Heat", Crawford presented new experiments proving that respiratory gas exchange in animals is a combustion (two years after Antoine Lavoisier's influential "On combustion in general"). Crawford also was involved in the discovery of the element strontium.

Adair Crawford was born in Crumlin, Belfast The son of Rev Thomas Crawford.

He studied medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. He qualified MA in 1770 and then worked at St George's Hospital in London before qualifying MD in 1780. He was Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, London, and physician at St Thomas' Hospital, London. He died at Lymington in Hampshire.

It is no coincidence that the titles of his publications usually begin with the word experiments. Crawford let the details of his experiments and their plain results do the talking, and generally refrained from theorising and over-interpretation. He did maintain the later-discredited phlogiston hypothesis, but wasn't doctrinaire about it.

In 1786 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1787 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were John Playfair, James Hutton, and James Gregory.

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