William Robert Grove

English physicist

• Born: July 11, 1811
• Birthplace: Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales
• Died: August 1, 1896
• Place of death: London, England

Although trained as a lawyer, Grove invented the electric cell that bears his name. He also discovered and popularized the conservation of energy principle and helped to reform the Royal Society of London.

Early Life

William Robert Grove was the only son of Anne Bevan and John Grove; his father was a magistrate and deputy lieutenant for Glamorganshire. After receiving instruction from private tutors, Grove attended Brasenose College, Oxford, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1832 and a master’s degree in 1835. It appeared that he was fated to follow his father in the legal profession. He was admitted as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn on November 11, 1831, and was called to the bar on November 23, 1835. On May 27, 1837, he married Emma Maria Powles, daughter of John Diston Powles of Summit House, Middlesex. They had two sons and four daughters.

Despite his preparation for a legal career, Grove had always been interested in science. In 1835, he appeared to suffer from bad health and turned from law to science, becoming a member of the Royal Institution in that same year. His scientific curiosity was drawn to the electric cell, invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800. As it evolved before 1835, the typical cell consisted of two pieces of different metals, called electrodes, placed in either one or two chemical solutions, called electrolytes. These cells were weak and provided current for only the shortest periods of time as a consequence of a phenomenon called polarization.

One of the first practical solutions to the problems of polarization was that of John Frederic Daniell, professor of chemistry at King’s College, London. Unlike Grove, Daniell was a member of the Royal Society of London, which had awarded Daniell its prestigious Rumford Medal in 1832 for an improved pyrometer, an instrument for measuring very high temperatures. The Daniell cell, as it came to be called, brought its inventor another distinguished honor from the Royal Society, the Copley Medal, in 1837.

Starting in 1835, Grove experimented with different electrodes and electrolytes. In 1839, he hit upon the combination that became the standard form of his cell: a zinc electrode in dilute sulfuric acid and a platinum electrode in strong nitric acid. A porous membrane separated the two acids and eliminated polarization, the same means used in the Daniell cell. Grove’s electrodes and electrolytes were different, however, and provided about twice the voltage of the Daniell cell and a current of up to ten amperes.

From a technical point of view, Grove had invented a superior cell. However, it was not practical. Platinum was expensive. Worse, as the cell operated, the platinum and concentrated nitric acid reacted to create poisonous gas. The German chemist Robert Bunsen, inventor of the laboratory burner of the same name, substituted an inexpensive carbon electrode for the platinum in 1841. This variation somewhat decreased the cell’s voltage, but it doubled the current produced. The higher cost of nitric versus sulfuric acid made the Grove-Bunsen cell costlier per unit than the Daniell cell. In terms of voltage and amperage, however, the Grove-Bunsen cell provided significant savings over the Daniell cell and became the workhorse battery for applications requiring large currents, especially early forms of electrical lighting, long-distance telegraph lines, and the growing electroplating industry.

The invention of his cell immediately helped Grove’s scientific career and brought him honor. On November 26, 1840, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. The next year, he was appointed professor of experimental philosophy (physics) at the Royal Institution, a position he held until 1847. The only cloud on the horizon was Daniell, who accused Grove of having stolen his idea. Grove denied the charges in a series of letters published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1842 and early 1843. The subject of the dispute was the use of the porous membrane, which the French scientist Antoine César Becquerel had used as early as 1829. Despite the sharp language of their letters, the two men did not become bitter enemies.

Life’s Work

Grove’s scientific work did not end with the electric cell, which he continually improved. The focus of his later work was the same as that which had brought him to study the cell in the first place: an understanding of the relationship between electrical and chemical phenomena. Throughout 1839 and 1840, he published the results of his experiments in British, French, and German scientific journals.

In 1841, Grove published an article on a method for etching daguerreotype plates. The daguerreotype was the first photographic process and involved chemically fixing an image on a metallic plate. At that time, there was no process for reproducing a number of prints from a negative. Grove devised an electrochemical process that converted the daguerreotype plate into a reverse etching from which positive copies could be printed.

Grove was especially interested in the possibility of using gases rather than liquids as electrolytes in electric batteries. Into sealed test tubes of hydrogen and oxygen, he inserted platinum strips so that one end was in the gas and the other end rested in a dilute solution of sulfuric acid. Grove discovered that a current flowed from one platinum strip to the other. He published his findings in 1842 and called this device his “gaseous voltaic battery.” Later, he used hydrogen and chlorine gas and increased the current produced.

Grove used his gas battery to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. He noted the electrical current created as a result of the chemical activity of the cell and the ability of that current to separate water chemically into hydrogen and oxygen. In short, it was a process of chemical and electrical energy conversions. As Grove wrote in 1842 in the Philosophical Magazine:

This battery establishes that gases in combining and acquiring a liquid form evolve sufficient force to decompose a similar liquid and cause it to acquire a gaseous form. This is to my mind the most interesting effect of the battery; it exhibits such a beautiful instance of the correlation of natural forces.

The “correlation of natural forces” was the subject of his Royal Institution lecture given on January 19, 1842, on advances in the physical sciences since the institution’s founding. He further developed the subject during his lectures that year. For Grove, the “correlation of natural forces” meant that the forces of nature, such as electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical energy, could be converted into one another, could neither be created nor destroyed, and were manifestations of a single force. It was a new idea that captured the excitement and built upon the discoveries of such contemporary scientists as Jöns Jakob Berzelius of Sweden, who attempted to explain all chemical reactions in terms of electricity; Hans Christian Oersted, the Dane who demonstrated the conversion of electricity into magnetism; and the Englishman Michael Faraday, who showed the production of magnetism from electricity.

The principle that Grove lectured about is fundamental to the modern understanding of the physical universe. Grove’s single force that revealed itself as various physical forces such as electricity and light is now called energy. The “correlation of natural forces” is known as the conservation of energy, which was discovered simultaneously by a number of scientists. In addition to Grove, Faraday in England, Hermann von Helmholtz (a physicist), and Justus von Liebig (a chemist) in Germany, to name a few, published articles and other works during the 1840’s, setting forth the principle of energy conservation. The large number of laboratory experiments that illustrated transformations of one force into another, especially electrical and chemical ones, led Grove to give his lectures on the convertibility of physical forces. He also made reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English writer and proponent of German Naturphilosophie, a philosophical movement that had lead many in Germany to discover the conservation principle as well.

Grove’s importance for the discovery of the conservation of energy was also his role as a science popularizer. Whereas others published their findings in the major scientific journals of the day, Grove first developed his ideas in the popular lectures he gave as professor of experimental philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1842. Over the next year, he refined these lectures, and the Royal Institution published the kernel of Grove’s ideas in 1846 as the fifty-two-page booklet On the Correlation of Physical Forces: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Delivered in the London Institution, in the Year 1843 .

From this rather modest start, On the Correlation of Physical Forces grew in size from edition to edition and spread Grove’s ideas throughout England as well as overseas. The second edition appeared in 1850 and was more than one hundred pages. The 1855 third edition was more than two hundred pages and was translated into French in 1856 and German in 1863. The fourth edition (1862) was nearly three hundred pages long and was republished in 1865 as the first American edition. The fifth edition (1867) was more than three hundred pages, and the sixth edition (1874) almost five hundred pages.

In addition to popularizing scientific knowledge, Grove was highly interested in scientific institutions. He was an original member of the London Chemical Society and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1840, he was voted a member of the Council in 1845, a year when prominent members who wished to raise the society’s standards were considering asking the government for a new charter. Grove joined the Charter Committee and played a significant role in realizing a number of reforms, such as the limitation of membership numbers, which were approved by the Council in 1847. Grove was also a member of the 1849 committee charged with reforming the process for awarding the society’s important Royal Medal.

As a consequence of his reform efforts, Grove was proposed as a candidate to fill a vacant society secretary post in 1848, but lost because of fighting between representatives of the physical and life sciences. As late as 1870, he was considered as a candidate for president of the Royal Society and continued to play an active role in the society’s life into the 1880’s.

Although maintaining an interest in the reform of the Royal Society and revising his book on the conservation of energy, Grove ceased to conduct experiments, perhaps because of his growing family (six children). He pursued a more financially rewarding career in law starting in 1853. In this, too, he excelled. In November, 1853, he became a member of the Queen’s Court. Between 1862 and 1864, he combined his knowledge of science and law as a member of the Royal Commission on patent law.

Grove then distinguished himself as a judge in various courts. He became a judge in common pleas court on November 30, 1871; a justice of the high court, November 1, 1875; and member of the queen’s bench division, December 16, 1880. He was knighted at Osborne, February 21, 1872. Grove retired from the bench in September, 1887, and wrote a number of odd philosophical works on the equilibrium of forces in nature before his death in 1896.

The high point of Grove’s legal career was his defense of William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner. Palmer had been dismissed from his apprenticeship with a Liverpool wholesale druggist for embezzlement. Apprenticed to a surgeon, he ran away after some misconduct. He eventually learned some medicine, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and started a general practice. He then gave this up, was married, and devoted himself to horse racing as an owner and breeder. Palmer was also a gambler and ran up enormous debts.

On September 29, 1854, Palmer’s wife died of “bilious cholera” and Palmer collected thirteen thousand pounds in life insurance. His brother Walter died suddenly and suspiciously the next year. Palmer did not receive any of the thirteen thousand pounds of insurance policies that he had on his brother. On December 15, 1855, Palmer was arrested and charged with poisoning his friend John Parsons Cook, a betting man. The multiple poisonings troubled the area’s residents, who attributed a number of mysterious local deaths to the Rugeley poisoner, as Palmer came to be called. The case was therefore tried elsewhere, at the Old Bailey, on May 14, 1856. News of the trial and Palmer’s poisoning of his wife, brother, and friend spread throughout England and Europe. Grove was Palmer’s defense attorney. Palmer was found guilty and hanged at Stafford on June 14, 1856.

Significance

Although dynamos driven by steam and water turbines provide homes and industries with an enormous amount of electric power, the predecessor of these large-scale generating systems was the electric battery. The multitude of nineteenth century electrical applications that preceded the dynamo, such as electroplating, telegraphy, telephony, railroad signals, doorbells, electric clocks, even electric motors and lights, depended upon the availability of a steady, inexpensive source of current. The batteries of the early decades of the nineteenth century were incapable of operating over extended periods because of polarization. The Daniell cell solved that problem inexpensively and set the stage for industrial use of the battery. Grove’s cell provided an even higher voltage and amperage, both necessary for the increasingly larger-scale uses of the battery during the 1850’s and 1860’s. By 1870, the use of the Grove-Bunsen cell had grown to such an enormous extent, with many telegraph stations and electroplating plants each employing hundreds of them, that an alternative was sought: the dynamo.

As significant as the Grove-Bunsen cell was in the early development of electrical technology, Sir William Robert Grove’s discovery of the conservation of energy has had more enduring impact. Energy conservation—the idea that energy is neither created nor destroyed—is fundamental to an understanding of the physical universe. Although he was not its sole discoverer, Grove was an important popularizer of the concept at a time when amateurs could and did make major contributions to scientific knowledge. This, undoubtedly, more than any of his other work, was the basis for Grove’s scientific reputation during his lifetime.

Far less known, however, are Grove’s efforts to reform the Royal Society of London. The consequence of those reforms increasingly turned the society into an organization of professional scientists. Since then, the growing professionalization of science and scientists has also left its mark on education, funding, and a range of other activities. Today, science often entails team research, specialized training, and multibillion-dollar equipment. The gifted, curiosity-driven amateur, such as Grove, is the exception. Ironically, Grove’s reforms have contributed to the creation of a world that would have excluded him.

Bibliography

Dunsheath, Percy. A History of Electrical Power Engineering. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962. Dunsheath places the invention of Grove’s cell within the history of batteries as well as electrical engineering in general.

“The Future of Fuel Cells.” Scientific American 281, no. 1 (July, 1999): 72. An overview of fuel cell technology, including an explanation of Grove’s 1839 research.

Grove, William Robert. Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. London: Longmans, Green, 1867. President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866, Grove delivered this speech on August 22, 1866, at the society’s meeting in Nottingham. Its subject was Grove’s favorite: the conservation of energy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. On the Correlation of Physical Forces: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Delivered in the London Institution, in the Year 1843. 6th ed. London: Longmans, Green, 1874. This volume provides Grove’s arguments in favor of the conservation of energy. The first edition reproduces the original series of lectures at the Royal Institution. Later editions include revisions and new material. The sixth edition also contains reprints of many of Grove’s early scientific papers.

Hall, Marie Boas. All Scientists Now: The Royal Society in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hall discusses Grove’s role as a reformer of the Royal Society of London, though this book is mainly concerned with the evolution of the society from an amateur to a professional organization of scientists in the nineteenth century.

Hoogers, Gregor, ed. Fuel Cell Technology Handbook. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2002. Describes the principles of fuel cell technology and their applications. Includes a brief history of fuel cell development, including information on Grove’s discovery of the basic technology in 1839.

Kuhn, Thomas S. “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery.” In Critical Problems in the History of Science, edited by Marshall Clagett. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959. Reprinted in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. An important work for understanding the discovery of energy conservation by Grove and others. It underlines the role of laboratory experiments and German Naturphilosophie.

Moore, Keith. “First Cell.” Professional Engineering 17, no. 13 (July 28, 2004): 50. Describes Grove’s fuel cell experiments and the technology he developed.

Webb, K. R. “Sir William Robert Grove (1811-1896) and the Origins of the Fuel Cell.” Journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry 85 (1961): 291-293. A short article on what Grove called his “gaseous voltaic battery,” which led him to his understanding of the conservation of energy.