Hugh Lee Pattinson

Biography

Pattinson was the son of Thomas Pattinson, a shopkeeper in the country town of Alston, Cumberland, and his wife Margaret Lee; they were Quakers. He was educated at local private schools. He was interested in science from an early age, doing experiments with electricity when he was 17, and also studying the chemistry of metals.

He began his working life by helping his father in his shop in Alston. In around 1825 he worked for Anthony Clapham, a soap maker in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1825 he became assay master (a tester of the purity of gold or silver coins) to the Greenwich Hospital Commissioners, back at Alston. In continuing experiments in metallurgy, he discovered the basis of his method of separating silver from lead in 1829, but had too little money to go any further. In 1831 he became works manager at Thomas Wentworth Beaumont's lead works. The greater income allowed him to continue his experiments on silver refining until he had a workable process.

In 1834 he resigned from Beaumont's works, and with John Lee and George Burnett, set up a new chemical works at Felling, near Gateshead. It employed around 300 men.

Pattinson process

Pattinson patented his silver refining process in 1833. It exploited some familiar properties of metals, namely that lead and silver melt at different temperatures. Pattinson's equipment consisted basically of nothing more complex than a row of about 8–9 iron pots, which were heated from below. Some lead, naturally containing a small percentage of silver, was loaded into the central pot and melted. This was then allowed to cool. As the lead solidified, it was skimmed off and moved to the next pot in one direction, and the remaining metal was then transferred to the next pot in the opposite direction. The process was repeated from one pot to the next, the lead accumulating in the pot at one end and the silver in the pot at the other.

The patent process earned Pattinson £16,000 in royalties. The earlier process of "cupellation" had required at least 8 ounces (250 grams) of silver per ton of lead to be economic. Cupellation involved removing the lead from a silver-rich alloy by oxidising the lead to litharge, leaving the silver behind. Pattinson's process was economic with as little as 2 to 3 ounces (about 75 grams) of silver per ton.

Daguerreotypes

In about 1840, Pattinson travelled to Canada in the hope of setting up a mining business, stopping at the Niagara Falls long enough to make the earliest known photograph of the falls, a daguerreotype which survives (2009) in the collection of Newcastle University. It was once believed that the small figure standing silhouetted with a top hat was added by an engraver working from imagination as well as the daguerreotype as his source, but the figure is clearly present in the photograph. Because of the very long exposure required, of ten minutes or more, the figure is assumed by Canada's Niagara Parks agency to be Pattinson himself. The image is left-right inverted, and taken from the Canadian side. Pattinson made other photographs of the Horseshoe Falls as well as of Rome and Paris. These were then transferred to engravings to illustrate Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours' Excursions Daguerriennes (Paris, 1841–1864). Aside from being the first known photograph of the Falls, Pattinson's image is also the earliest known surviving photograph of any part of Canada, which wouldn't become a nation for another 27 years.

Other inventions

In 1841 Pattinson patented two other chemical processes, one for making lead carbonate, and the other for manufacturing "magnesia alba", a white magnesium oxide. In 1849 he patented his process for making a new white lead pigment, lead oxychloride.

His lead oxychloride process became a profitable industrial reality in 1850, when Pattinson and his partners (and sons-in-law) Isaac Lowthian Bell and Robert Benson Bowman established a chemical company at Washington, County Durham. Under an 1850 Indenture, Charles William Vane, Marquis of Londonderry, Pattinson and Bell declared themselves "chemical manufacturers and co-partners in trade".

Honours and achievements

In 1838 Pattinson became vice-president of the chemical section of the British Association. He was a fellow of the Geological Society and also of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Pattinson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) on 3 June 1852 for his metallurgical work.

Family life

Pattinson married Phoebe Walton on 25 December 1815, having been baptised by the vicar of Alston, Benjamin Jackson, as a member of the Church of England on 23 December 1815 in a public house, the Angel Inn at Alston, as Phoebe's family would not accept marriage to a "Quaker". He took his mother's surname Lee at the baptism.

Pattinson's three daughters married, respectively, the ironmaster Isaac Lowthian Bell, the bookseller and publisher Robert Benson Bowman, and the cable manufacturer Robert Stirling Newall. The brothers-in-law, and Pattinson himself, shared several different business partnerships. In addition, all three brothers-in-law were members of Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club and the Natural History Society of Northumberland.

He died on 11 November 1858. He was buried in Washington churchyard. He was survived by his son, also named Hugh Lee, and three daughters. Two other sons, Walter and Thomas, died before him.