William Nicholson

William Nicholson was a British scientist, writer and inventor, born December 13, 1753 and died May 21, 1815 in Bloomsbury, London, remembered above all for the first deliberate splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. Educated in Yorkshire, he worked as Josiah Wedgwood's agent in Amsterdam before turning to science and publishing, launching Britain's first monthly scientific periodical, A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, in 1797 and editing it until 1814. In 1800, Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle built a voltaic pile and used it to pass a current through water, achieving what is credited as the first sustained electrolysis, decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, the founding demonstration behind every later method of producing hydrogen by electrolysis. He also invented the Nicholson hydrometer for measuring the specific gravity of liquids in 1784, patented a cylindrical printing press in 1790, translated chemical works by the French chemists Antoine Fourcroy and Jean-Antoine Chaptal, and edited the six-volume British Encyclopedia, published in 1809.