Elizabeth Fulhame

Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1794) was a Scottish chemist who invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. The book relays in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions. In 1798, the book was translated into German in 1798 by Augustin Gottfried Ludwig Lentin as Versuche über die Wiederherstellung der Metalle durch Wasserstoffgas. In 1810, it was published in the United States, to much critical acclaim. That same year, Fulhame was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society. Thomas P. Smith applauded her work, stating that "Mrs. Fulham has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also."

Elizabeth Fulhame published under her married name, as Mrs. Fulhame. She was married to Thomas Fulhame, an Irish-born physician who had attended the University of Edinburgh and studied puerperal fever. Elizabeth herself is believed to have been Scottish. Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, referred to her as "the ingenious and lively Mrs. Fulhame", but this opinion may reflect simply the style of her book.

Mrs. Fulhame's work began with her interest in finding way of staining cloth with heavy metals under the influence of light. She originally considered calling her work An Essay on the Art of making Cloths of Gold, Silver, and other Metals, by chymical processes, but considering the "imperfect state of the art", decided to select a title reflecting the broader implications of her experiments.

"The possibility of making cloths of gold, silver, and other metals, by chymical processes, occurred to me in the year 1780: the project being mentioned to Doctor Fulhame, and some friends, was deemed improbable. However, after some time, I had the satisfaction of realizing the idea, in some degree, by experiment."

She was apparently encouraged to publish an account of her fourteen years of research as a result of meeting Sir Joseph Priestley in 1793. Elizabeth Fulhame studied the experimental reduction of metallic salts in a variety of states (aqueous solution, dry state, and sometimes an ether or alcohol solution) by exposing them to the action of various reducing agents. The metal salts she examined included gold, silver, platinum, mercury, copper, and tin. As reducing agents, she experimented with hydrogen, gas, phosphorus, potassium sulfide, hydrogen sulfide, phosphine, charcoal, and light. She discovered a number of chemical reactions by which metal salts could be reduced to pure metals. Rayner-Canham considers her most important contribution to chemistry to be the discovery that metals could be processed through acqueous chemical reduction at room temperature, as an alternative to smelting at high temperatures.

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