Nationality British | Name Walter Weldon | |
Born 31 October 1832
Loughborough, England ( 1832-10-31 ) Died 20 September 1885(1885-09-20) (aged 52)
Burstow England | ||
Walter Weldon (31 October 1832 – 20 September 1885) FRS, FRSE was an English chemist, journalist.
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Biography
Weldon was brother to Ernest J. Weldon, founder of Weldon & Wilkinson Ltd. Walter's second son was Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, an English evolutionary zoologist and biometrician.
In 1854 he began work as a journalist in London with The Dial (which was afterwards incorporated in The Morning Star), and in 1860 he started a monthly magazine, Weldon's Register of Facts and Occurrences relating to Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, which was later discontinued.
His publications in the late 1800s were through Weldon & Company, a pattern company who produced hundreds of patterns and projects for numerous types of Victorian needlework. Around 1888, the company began to publish a series of books entitled Weldon’s Practical Needlework, each volume consisting of the various newsletters (one year of publications) bound together with a cloth cover and costing 2 shilling/6 pence. Weldon's Ladies' Journal (1875–1954) supplied dressmaking patterns, and was a blueprint for subsequent 'home weeklies'. .
Weldon was interested in parapsychology and was a spiritualist, he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Chemistry
Weldon was a successful chemist and developed the Weldon process to produce chlorine by boiling hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide. MnO2 was expensive, and Weldon developed a process for its recycling by treating the manganese chloride produced with milk of lime and blowing air through the mixture to form a precipitate known as Weldon mud which was used to generate more chlorine.
Manganese dioxide reacts with hydrochloric acid to chlorine and Manganse chloride: