John Mayow
| John Mayow | |
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John Mayow
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| Born | 24 May 1640 |
| Died | October 1679 London |
| Nationality | England |
| Fields | chemistry |
| Known for | pneumatic chemistry |
John Mayow FRS (1641–1679) was a chemist, physician, and physiologist who is remembered today for conducting early research into respiration and the nature of air. Mayow worked in a field that is sometimes called pneumatic chemistry.
There has been controversy over both the location and year of Mayow's birth, with both Cornwall and London claimed, along with birth years from 1641 to 1645. Proctor's extensive research led him to conclude that Mayow was born in 1641 near Morval in Cornwall and that he was admitted to Wadham College, Oxford at age 17 in 1658. A year later Mayow became a scholar at Oxford, and in 1660 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. He graduated in law (bachelor, 1665, doctor, 1670), but made medicine his profession, and became noted for his practice therein, especially in the summer time, in the city of Bath. In 1678, on the proposal of Robert Hooke, Mayow was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society. The following year, after a marriage which was not altogether to Mayow's content, he died in London and was buried in the Church of St Paul, Covent Garden.
Mayow published at Oxford in 1668 two tracts, on respiration and rickets, and in 1674 these were reprinted, the former in an enlarged and corrected form, with three others De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo, De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo, and De motu musculari et spiritibus animalibus as Tractatus quinque medico-physici. The contents of this work, which was several times republished and translated into Dutch, German and French, show him to have been an investigator much in advance of his time.
Accepting as proved by Boyle's experiments that air is necessary for combustion, Mayow showed that fire is supported not by the air as a whole but by a more active and subtle part of it. This part he called "spiritus igneo-aereus," or sometimes "nitro-aereus", for he identified it with one of the constituents of the acid portion of nitre (now called potassium nitrate, KNO3) which he regarded as formed by the union of fixed alkali with a spiritus acidus. In combustion the particulae nitro-aereae – either pre-existent in the thing consumed or supplied by the air – combined with the material burnt; as Mayow inferred from his observation that antimony, strongly heated with a burning glass, undergoes an increase of weight which can be attributed to nothing else but these particles.
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