Friedrich Accum - Bibliography and Primary Sources

Bibliography and Primary Sources

The first biographical sketch of Friedrich Accum's life was written by the American agricultural chemist and historian of science Charles Albert Browne, Jr. in 1925. He studied the life and works of Accum closely for ten years, which he was able to complement with information from civil and ecclesiastical sources in Bückeburg. His enthusiasm for the subject was so great that he traveled to Germany in July 1930 to meet with Hugo Otto Georg Hans Westphal (August 26, 1873 – September 15, 1934), a great-grandson of Accum's. Brown's last writing on the subject, which appeared in 1948 in Chymia, a journal for the history of chemistry, relied to a great extent on the information he gathered from Hugo Westphal. Three years later, R. J. Cole published an outline of Accum's life based on English sources. He was particularly concerned with bringing new information to light about the judicial process of 1821. Like Browne, Cole also provided relatively little data about the last part of Accum's life in Berlin. A modern presentation about Accum's life and works that fills in the lacuna in the available biographies has not been written. Lawson Cockroft of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London observed that Friedrich Accum was one of those chemists who, despite significant achievements in his lifetime, was by and large forgotten today.

Probably the best known pictorial representation of Accum was an engraving by James Thomson made in July 1820 for the English journal European Magazine. It shows Accum sitting at a table close to a gas lamp. Thomson's engraving was probably based on an oil painting by the London portrait painter Samuel Drummond (1765–1844), who had shown Accum in a similar pose in a painting produced a few years prior to this. In addition, Accum's brother-in-law, the artist Wilhelm Strack, painted an oil portrait that shows Accum as a young man.

A few letter fragments and documents relating to Accum still exist in his family's possession. A certificate from the Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde (society of natural philosophical friends), based in Berlin and granting honorary membership to Accum, dated November 1, 1814, was made available online in 2006. A letter from Accum written in London and addressed to his brother Philipp in Bückeburg, about life in London after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, is also available online at Wikisource.