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Sir Frederick Augustus Abel, 1st Baronet ( 17 July 1827 – 6 September 1902 ) was an English Chemist . Born in London , Abel studied chemistry for six years under A. W. Von Hofmann at the Royal College Of Chemistry , then became professor of chemistry at the Royal Military Academy in 1851 , and three years later was appointed chemist to the War Department and chemical referee to the government. During his tenure of this office, which lasted until 1888 , he carried out a large amount of work in connection with the chemistry of Explosive s. One of the most important of his investigations had to do with the manufacture of Guncotton , and he developed a process, consisting essentially of reducing the nitrated cotton to fine pulp, which enabled it to be safely manufactured and at the same time yielded the product in a form that increased its usefulness. This work to an important extent prepared the way for the " Smokeless Powder s" which came into general use towards the end of the 19th Century ; Cordite , the type adopted by the British government in 1891 , was invented jointly by him and Sir James Dewar . He and Dewar were unsuccessfully sued by Alfred Nobel over infringement of Nobel's Patent for a similar explosive called Ballistite , the case finally being resolved in the House Of Lords in 1895 . He also extensively researched the behaviour of Black Powder when ignited, with the Scottish Physicist Sir Andrew Noble . At the request of the British Government , he devised the Abel Test , a means of determining the Flash Point of Petroleum products. His first instrument, the open-test apparatus, was specified in an Act Of Parliament in 1868 for officially specifying Petroleum products. It was superseded in August 1879 by the much more reliable Abel close-test instrument. In Electricity Abel studied the construction of electrical Fuse s and other applications of electricity to warlike purposes, and his work on problems of Steel manufacture won him in 1897 the Bessemer Medal of the Iron And Steel Institute , of which from 1891 to 1893 he was president. He was president of the Institution Of Electrical Engineers (then the Society of Telegraph Engineers) in 1877. He became a member of the Royal Society in 1860 , and received a royal medal in 1887 . He took an important part in the work of the Inventions Exhibition (London) in 1885, and in 1887 became organizing secretary and first director of the Imperial Institute , a position he held till his death in 1902. He was knighted in 1891, and created a Baronet in 1893 . BOOKS
He also wrote several important articles in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica . |