John Percy (metallurgist)

John Percy (23 March 1817 – 19 June 1889) was an English metallurgist.

The third son of Henry Percy, a solicitor, he was born at Nottingham on 23 March 1817. He went to a private school at Southampton, and then returned to Nottingham, where he attended chemical lectures by a Mr. Grisenthwaite at the local school of medicine. He wished to become a chemist; but his father's wish was that he should graduate in medicine, and in April 1834 he was taken by his brother Edmund to Paris to begin his medical studies. While in Paris he attended the lectures of Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thénard on chemistry, and of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu on botany.

In 1836 Percy went for a tour in Switzerland and the south of France, and made a collection of mineralogical and botanical specimens. He went on to Edinburgh, where he became a pupil of Sir Charles Bell and a friend of Edward Forbes. In 1838 he graduated M.D. in the university, and received a gold medal for a thesis on the presence of alcohol in the brain after poisoning by that substance. In 1839 he was elected physician to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham, but, having private means, did not practise.

Local industry excited his interest in metallurgy. In 1846 he worked with David Forbes and William Hallowes Miller on crystallised slags. In 1847 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and served on the council from 1857 to 1859. In 1851 he was elected Fellow of the Geological Society, and was appointed lecturer on metallurgy at the newly founded Metropolitan School of Science in London, under Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche; the post was later made a professorship. Percy exerted influence, while holding this position, on metallurgy as a discipline, and through his pupils. The silver process was the only metallurgical one he actually invented, but his work suggested others; and the Gilchrist-Thomas process for making Bessemer steel from iron ores containing phosphorus was an outcome of his work, and was discovered by pupils.

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