Sir Eric Rideal who was one of the founders of catalysis in Great Britain and who was the eponym of the famous Eley Rideal mechanism. Professor E. Rideal was famous for the work of the Colloid Science Laboratory which he set up in Cambridge University in the 1930s. He was born in 1890 and was first involved in surface chemistry during the First World War when, with
H.S. Taylor, he worked on catalysts for the Haber process for the production of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, and for the selective oxidation of carbon monoxide in mixtures of CO and hydrogen. Later Taylor and Rideal wrote a pioneering book Catalysis in Theory and Practice. The Rideal Conference is so named in his honor; this triennial series of UK research conferences on surface chemistry and catalysis was initiated by Charles Kemball and others in the late 1960s.
Contributed by Jacques Vedrine
June 2002