Harold Baily Dixon
Harold Baily Dixon (1852-1930)
1930 Obituary[1]
"THE LATE PROFESSOR H. B. DIXON.
Like the astronomer, Professor H. H. Turner, whose sudden death we had to announce a few weeks ago, Dr. H. B. Dixon, Professor of Chemistry at Victoria University, Manchester, until 1922, and Honorary Professor since then, was suddenly taken ill while on a journey. This occurred at Lytham railway station, on September 18, and Professor Dixon died on the same day.
Harold Baily Dixon, son of the editor of the Athenaeum, William Hepworth Dixon, was born on August 11, 1852, and was educated at Westminster School. At Christ Church, Oxford, he came under the tuition of the chemist, Professor Vernon Harcourt, whom he subsequently assisted in his gas researches and also in his photometric work. In this connection, he conducted photometric measurements at the South Foreland lighthouse in 1884-5 on behalf of Trinity House. Together with his father, he paid a visit to Canada and the United States, visiting the mines of Montana and Oregon in 1874. But he was little in touch with industrial chemistry, and his selection, in 1886, when he was a lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford, to succeed Sir Henry Roscoe as Professor of Chemistry at Owens College, Manchester, was received with some surprise, not only in Manchester. Roscoe’s colleague, the technical chemist, Professor Schorlemmer, co-author of Roscoe’s Lessons in Elementary Chemistry, in those days the popular text-book for chemical students, would probably have been more acceptable to the great chemical interests of the district.
Dixon investigated the explosions of gases, and the effect of traces of water vapour in these reactions, a problem which was not finally settled in the half-century which he devoted to the investigation. One of his difficulties was to find suitable glass tubes for these experiments. When he succeeded in interesting a glassworks firm in their manufacture, he was asked to have his tubes fetched, the firm declining the risk of transport. This gas-reaction investigation also brought Dixon into contact with the inquiry into mine explosions and the work on coal-dust explosions of the Mining Association at Altofts, later continued by the Government at Eskmeals and Buxton. Dixon was also a member of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies, 1911-14, and his war work was likewise connected with explosives, as well as with the Alcohol Fuel Committee. Of a more general nature were his activities as chairman of the General Board of Studies at Manchester, and of the Royal Technical Institute at Safford. The Royal Society admitted him in 1886, and he delivered the Bakerian lecture on the rate of explosions in gases in 1893. He was President of the Chemical Society in 1911-13, and was made a C.B.E. in 1918. Balliol College elected him a Fellow in the same year that be proceeded to Manchester."