William Robert Grove - Scientific Work

Scientific Work

In 1829 at the Royal Institution Grove met Emma Maria Powles, and he married her in 1837. The couple embarked on a tour of the continent for their honeymoon. This sabbatical offered Groves an opportunity to pursue his scientific interests and resulted in his first scientific paper suggesting some novel constructions for electric cells.

In 1839, Grove developed a novel form of electric cell, the Grove cell, which used zinc and platinum electrodes exposed to two acids and separated by a porous ceramic pot. Grove announced the latter development to the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1839. In 1840 Grove invented the first incandescent electric light, which was later perfected by Thomas Edison. Later that year he gave another account of his development at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Birmingham, where it aroused the interest of Michael Faraday. On Faraday's invitation Grove presented his discoveries at the prestigious Royal Institution Friday Discourse on 13 March 1840.

Grove's presentation made his reputation, and he was soon proposed for Fellowship of the Royal Society by such distinguished men as William Thomas Brande, William Snow Harris and Charles Wheatstone. Grove also attracted the attention of John Peter Gassiot, a relationship that resulted in Grove's becoming the first professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution in 1841. Grove's inaugural lecture in 1842 was the first announcement of what Grove called the correlation of physical forces, in modern terms, the conservation of energy.

In 1842, Grove developed the first fuel cell (which he called the gas voltaic battery), which produced electrical energy by combining hydrogen and oxygen, and described it using his correlation theory. In developing the cell and showing that steam could be disassociated into oxygen and hydrogen, and the process reversed, he was the first person to demonstrate the thermal dissociation of molecules into their constituent atoms. The first demonstration of this effect, he gave privately to Faraday, Gassiot and Edward William Brayley, his scientific editor. His work also led him to early insights into the nature of ionisation.

In the 1840s Grove also collaborated with Gassiot at the London Institution on photography and the Daguerreotype and calotype processes. Inspired by his legal practice, he presciently observed:

It would be vain to attempt specifically to predict what may be the effect of Photography on future generations. A Process by which the most transient actions are rendered permanent, by which facts write their own annals in a language that can never be obsolete, forming documents which prove themselves, — must interweave itself not only with science but with history and legislature.

— London Institution, 19 January 1842

In 1852 he discovered striae, dark bands that occur in electrical breakdown, and investigated their character, presenting his work in an 1858 Bakerian lecture.