拉斐尔·梅尔多拉1849—1915

Birth

Born in Islington, London, he was descended from Raphael Meldola (1754–1828), a theologian who was acting minister of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in London, 1804. Meldola was the only son of Samuel Meldola; married (1886) Ella Frederica, daughter of Maurice Davis of London. The Meldola family traced their family tree to Isaiah Meldola, who died at Toledo in 1340.

Education

Meldola was educated at Northwick College, Maida Hill before entering the Royal College of Chemistry, London in 1866, where he studied under Edward Frankland. There is a portrait of Meldola (oil on canvas) by Solomon J. Solomon in the Royal Society collection; also a photograph by Maull & Fox, visiting card size.

Career

Meldola worked in the private laboratory of John Stenhouse (FRS 1848). In 1870, he became a laboratory assistant at Messrs Dower of Brantford, where he first worked on coal-tar dyes.

He was appointed Lecturer, Royal College of Science (1872) and assisted Norman Lockyer with spectroscopy. Meldola was in charge of the British Eclipse Expedition to the Nicobar Islands (1875) and was Professor of Chemistry, Technical College, Finsbury (1885). He was also an entomologist and natural historian.

Meldola was a member of many scientific societies: Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry; Fellow of the Chemical Society (London and Berlin); Member of the Pharmaceutical Society; The Geologists Association; The Royal Anthropological Institute; Entomological Society of London. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886 (Charles Darwin was one of his proposers), awarded the Davy Medal in 1913, and was vice-president of the council from 1914 to 1915.

Meldola was President of the Entomological Society, 1895–1897; the Chemical Society, 1905–1907; Society of Dyers and Colourists, 1907–1910; Society of Chemical Industry 1908–1909; Institute of Chemistry, 1912–1915. He was the first president of the Maccabaeans, 1891–1915. In his honour the Royal Society of Chemistry award the Meldola medal each year.

Mimicry

Meldola was a keen naturalist, spending five years eagerly collecting evidence on mimicry in butterflies, inspired by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. His work provided evidence for natural selection, acknowledged by the evolutionary zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton in his book The Colours of Animals and thanked by Darwin for information on hexadactyly (a rare case of a person having six digits on each limb).

In 1910, Meldola gave the Herbert Spencer lecture in Oxford on 'Evolution, Darwinian and Spenserian.'

Meldola Blue

He discovered the synthetic dye Meldola's Blue.