ABSTRACT
No doubt the Council who elected him to this office in 1913 agreed and believed that Crookes, despite his advanced years, would be able to follow this model.
A helpful factor in his election to the presidency was the award of the Society of Chemical Industry’s Medal in October 1912, as well as the Elliott Cresson Gold Medal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. As we have seen, Crookes had strongly supported the creation of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) in 1888 in the columns of Chemical News and regularly reported its subsequent activities. The society had created an American branch and the award was first made to Crookes at the New York AGM in his absence. At the age of 80 Crookes had no wish to travel to America; consequently it was presented to Crookes at a dinner held in his honour at the Criterion Restaurant in London.2 Rudolph Messel, the society’s President, highlighted Crookes’ ‘astonishing power of insight’ unequalled in his generation. In what may seem to us ironical in view of Crookes’ commercial interests, Messel underlined the way Crookes had ‘contented himself in indicating the way in which
science may be advanced, rather than in reaping the fruits of his labour in gaining a fortune by its industrial application’. At the dinner, Crookes did not reminisce but rather reflected on the contrast between the work he had done with atoms and molecules and minute weights with the society’s industrialists who worked with huge weights of raw materials and gigantic engines. Industrial chemistry, he suggested, had been a Victorian development and was now indispensable to life and civilization. Embarrassingly, it was Dewar (a former President of the SCI) who proposed the loyal toast to the society and to its retiring President, his personal friend Messel.
